More Isn't Always Better – Measuring Customers' Preferences for Digital Process Transparency

Digital technologies have made the line of visibility more transparent, enabling customers to get deeper insights into an organization's core operations than ever before. This creates new challenges for organizations trying to consistently deliver high-quality customer experiences. In this paper we conduct an empirical analysis of customers’ preferences and their willingness-to-pay for different degrees of process transparency, using the example of digitally-enabled business-to-customer delivery services. Applying conjoint analysis, we quantify customers' preferences and willingness-to-pay for different service attributes and levels. Our contributions are two-fold: For research, we provide empirical measurements of customers’ preferences and their willingness-to-pay for process transparency, suggesting that more is not always better. Additionally, we provide a blueprint of how conjoint analysis can be applied to study design decisions regarding changing an organization's digital line of visibility. For practice, our findings enable service managers to make decisions about process transparency and establishing different levels of service quality

A framework for innovative service design

Drawing on research from design science, marketing and service science, our paper provides an integrated framework for evaluating and directing innovative service design. The main goal of our review is to highlight the strengths of existing frameworks and to suggest how they can be enhanced in combination with design science principles. Based on our review, we propose a new framework for the design of innovative services that integrates several key paradigmatic approaches and identifies fundamental open research questions. Our approach is unique as it combines three service disciplines, namely services marketing, service science, and design science, and provides a new framework that describes step by step the procedure that needs to be taken and the conditions that need to be met for developing innovative services. We believe that providing such a framework is a valuable addition to the literature

ENGINEERING KNOWLEDGE-INTENSE, PERSONORIENTED SERVICES – A STATE OF THE ART ANALYSIS

This paper provides a state-of-the-art analysis of service engineering (SE) approaches for knowledgeintense person-oriented (KIPO) services, focussing on IT-enabled provision of such services. Key attributes are derived that distinguish KIPOs from other services. These attributes are integrated in a framework with regard to their applicability on KIPOs development and used for a systematic literature review. KIPOs are of high economic relevance, yet they are laggards in terms of realization of IT potentials. As the most value-creating activities in service provision are bound to persons or personal knowledge, KIPOs design is complicated. The analysis reveals several gaps in SE research. In particular, identified shortcomings of existent approaches are an insufficient level of detail, i.e. no concrete actions or methods for deployment are described, a lack of practical corroboration as well as insufficient IT support. Further, current approaches are not sufficiently equipped to handle the interplay between people-bound activities and technical components. This paper contributes to IS research by clearly identifying these gaps in SE methods. It further provides researchers with ideas for future research activities and guides practitioners in selecting methods that serve as candidates to be integrated into KIPOs development in order to leverage IT potentials more systematically and efficiently

Service Interaction Flow Analysis Technique for Service Personalization

Abstract Service interaction flows are difficult to capture, analyze, outline, and represent for research and design purposes. We examine how variation of personalized service flows in technology-mediated service interaction can be modeled and analyzed to provide information on how service personalization could support interaction. We have analyzed service interaction cases in a context of technology-mediated car rental service. With the analysis technique we propose, inspired by Interaction Analysis method, we were able to capture and model the situational service interaction. Our contribution regarding technology-mediated service interaction design is twofold: First, with the increased understanding on the role of personalization in managing variation in technology-mediated service interaction, our study contributes to designing service management information systems and human-computer interfaces that support personalized service interaction flows. Second, we provide a new analysis technique for situated interaction analysis, particularly when the aim is to understand personalization in service interaction flows

Ambidexterity in Service Innovation Research: A Systematic Literature Review

Increased interconnectedness of multiple actors and digital resources in service eco-systems offer new opportunities for service innovation. In digitally transforming eco-systems, organizations need to explore and exploit innovation simultaneously, which is defined as ambidexterity. However, research on ambidextrous service innovation is scarce. We provide a systematic literature review based on the concepts of ambidexterity, offering two contributions. First, research strands are disconnected, emphasizing either exploration or exploitation of service innovation, despite an organizations’ need to accelerate innovation cycles of exploring and exploiting services. Second, a new framework for ambidextrous service innovation is provided, inspired by the dynamism and generative mechanisms of the ontologically related concept of organizational routines. The framework adopts the perspective of a mutually constitutive relationship between exploring new and exploiting current resources, activities, and knowledge. The findings remedy the scattered literature through a coherent perspective on service innovation that responds to organizations’ needs and guides future research

Service designers, unite! Identifying shared concerns among multidisciplinary perspectives on service design

Service Design is a multidisciplinary approach that asks for further research to be better integrated. This article contributes to bridging this gap by identifying shared concerns among multidisciplinary perspectives on Service Design. A qualitative study involving six focus groups was conducted on international Service Design research centers. Results show the service system concept as an abstraction that supports integrating multidisciplinary perspectives and their contributions to Service Design, by identifying shared concerns across different levels: (a) at an individual-actor level, the shared concern of an actor-centered approach; (b) at an organizational service delivery system level, the shared focus on processes and interfaces; and (c) at network and ecosystem levels, the shared interest in designing for new constellations of actors and their connected roles. This article integrates different concepts and approaches to Service Design developed in dispersed areas, supporting dialogue, collaboration and theory building to advance Service Design as an interdisciplinary field