Customer Contribution-Aware Incident Management: A Problem Space Explication for Digitally Mediated Service Episodes

Digitally mediated incident management depends on customer-side input – context, evidence, access enablement, and confirmations – yet these contributions are weakly represented in episode-level operational control. In a remote operations support context, we explicate the problem space of customer contribution-aware incident management and show how contribution dependence produces predictable bottlenecks when customer readiness is unqualified or delayed. Based on seven expert interviews in a large industrial equipment manufacturer and a Gioia-inspired analysis, we identify three recurring challenges: unqualified early contribution signals that leave work readiness ambiguous, ad-hoc intervention in contribution-contingent states that consumes scarce specialist capacity, and contribution-blind routing, scheduling, and pacing that propagates “not-ready” work into expert queues and drives long-tail resolution. Building on these challenges and corresponding deficits, we derive four design objectives for an artifact intended to address these issues and an evaluation logic emphasizing operational benefit, decision defensibility, and acceptability under digital trace constraints.