Success Factors for Effective Customer Interaction in Digital Sales: A Case from the Digital Investment Service Industry

In the off-line world, capable sales representatives align their advisory approach with their customer´s individual profile to improve the quality of the process and the likelihood of a positive outcome for both parties. However, we see a movement away from the classical advisory settings towards “omni-channel” strategies, where companies serve their customers through a combination of on-line and off-line channels. In this short paper, we undertake a first investigation of how specific characteristics in the customer profile could affect the advisory success and introduce the OPTI-model . We illustrate the application of our model using the example of Digital Investment Services, knowing that the financial services industry is one area where “omni-channel” strategies have become highly relevant

Generating Procedural Controls to Facilitate Trade: The Role of Control in the Absence of Trust

Over the years, Trust has been recognized in the Bled community as a key enabling factor to stimulate Electronic Commerce. Authors have discussed formal aspects of trust, the role trust plays in the adoption of both B2B and B2C Electronic Commerce, as well as mechanisms to build trust and/or overcome the lack of it. This article first provides a brief overview of the Trust-related articles in the Bled eConference. It then focuses on one specific aspect of the facilitation of trade in absence of trust: the development of procedural controls that enable Electronic Commerce at arms’ length, summarizing the contributions of the authors on this theme at the Bled Conference since the early 1990s. The paper concludes with the authors’ current view on developing procedural controls, focusing on the design process itself, which is often a rather lengthy process consisting of trial-and -error. Here a more analytical approach is proposed to the identification of control requirements for inter-organizational procedures. The approach involves abstracting the process to identify its basic deontic elements. A model checking approach is then applied to identify needed controls

Social Media in B2B Financial Services: A Matter of Trust and Responsiveness?

This study explores satisfaction with Virtual Communities in a Financial Services setting. It presents an empirical exploration that seeks to explain how external variables, such as information quality and system quality of a VC, affect beliefs, such asusefulness, ease of use, responsiveness, and trust, which in turn shape satisfaction. As such, it contributes to the growing body of knowledge on Social Media, in particular addressing the relatively unexplored domain of Business-to-Business (B2B) when individuals act on behalf of a company instead of their own interests

The Business Value of Enterprise Data Models

It is hard to underestimate the role of (big) data in modern society. An organization’s ability to handle its data management has become a competitive force in its own right. While the business value of Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a whole is widely recognized, little practical guidance can be found in literature on the business value of Enterprise Data Models (EDM) as part of EA. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for evaluating the business benefits of EDM, based on a Grounded Delphi study we performed at a large multinational case organization in the oil & gas industry