Setting the stage for service experience:design strategies for functional services

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify service design strategies to improve outcome-oriented services by enhancing consumers’ emotional experience, while overcoming customer variability. Design/methodology/approach: An abductive, multiple-case study involves 12 service firms from diverse online and offline service sectors. Findings: Overall, six service design strategies represent two overarching themes: customer empowerment can involve design for typical customers, visibility, and community building, while customer accommodation can involve design for personas, invisibility, and relationship building. Using these strategies helps set the stage for a service to offer an emotional experience. Research limitations/implications: The study offers a first step toward combining investigations of service experience and user experience. Further research can strengthen these links. Practical implications: The six design strategies described using examples from case research offer managerial recommendations. In particular, these strategies can help service managers address the customer-induced variability inherent in services. Originality/value: Extant studies of experience staging have focused on particular sectors such as hospitality and leisure; this study contributes by investigating outcome-focused services and identifying strategies to create unique experiences that offset variability. It also represents a rare effort to combine research from service management and interaction design, shedding light on the link between service experience and user experience

Workshop on the Use of Serious Games in the Education of Engineers

AbstractSerious games have proved to be an important tool in supporting the education and training at schools and universities as well as for vocational training in industry. Most games designed for educational or vocational use are designed for a very narrow purpose, mostly for mediating a small range of skills to a specific target group. This paper outlines the workshop on the use of serious games in the education of engineers. It presents the topic and raises some questions that will be discussed during the workshop

Articulating the service concept in professional service firms

Purpose: This study proposes a solution to the challenges of Professional Service Firms (PSF), which are referred to as cat herding, opaque quality and lack of process standardization. These result from misalignment in the mental pictures that managers, employees and customers have of the service. The study demonstrates how the process of articulating a shared service concept reduces these challenges. Methodology: A narrative methodology is used to analyze the perspectives of old management, new management and employees during organizational change in a PSF–a website design company growing to offer full-service branding. Group narratives are constructed using longitudinal data gathered through interviews and fieldwork, in order to compare the misaligned mental pictures and show the benefits of articulating the service concept. Findings: Professional employees view growth and change as threats to their culture and practice, particularly when new management seeks to standardize processes. These threats are revealed to stem from misinterpretations caused by miscommunication of intentions and lack of participation in decision making. Articulating a shared service concept helps to align understanding and return the firm to equilibrium. Research Limitations: The narrative methodology helps unpack conflicting perspectives, but is open to claims of subjectivity and misrepresentation. To ensure fairness and trustworthiness, informants were invited to review and approve the narratives. Originality: The study contributes propositions related to the value of articulating a shared service concept as a means of minimizing the challenges of PSFs

Design and innovation in successful product competition

This paper presents results from a project entitled ‘MArket Demands that Reward Investment in Design’ (MADRID). Among other aims, MADRID seeks to identify the contribution of design and innovation to product competitiveness in different markets. The paper provides a conceptual analysis of the role of design and innovation in product competition. The concepts are employed to conduct an analysis of a sample of new and redesigned products using data from a previous study on the ‘Commercial Impacts of Design’ (CID). CID was a study of over 220 design and product development projects in British SMEs which had received government financial support for design. The key conclusions from this re-analysis of the CID data are: in commercially successful product development projects more attention had been paid than in the loss-making projects to genuine product improvements rather than just styling or costs; commercially successful product development projects involved a multi-dimensional approach to design with a focus on product performance, features and build quality and, where relevant, technical or design innovation. Loss-making projects tended to involve a narrow, often styling-oriented, approach to design with more attention paid to cost reduction than to performance, quality and innovation

Serious Games Adoption in Organizations – An Exploratory Analysis

This paper arises from work ongoing in the GALA (Games and Learning Alliance – Network of Excellence for Serious Games). An exploratory set of case studies were carried out to understand the benefits, barriers and enablers of adopting serious games in companies and non-educational organizations. Serious games are games that educate, train and inform. It could therefore be expected that serious games would play an important role within corporate training, but this seems not to be the case. Five exploratory case studies of SG adoption were collected. There was use of serious games for training (three cases) and for corporate change interventions (two cases). Most of the organizations commissioned the SG from an external party and only in one case did the organization itself develop the serious game. The key finding was that senior management support was critical for serious game adoption in every case. SG adoption was typically limited to a single department or branch/subsidiary of the company

Serious games adoption in corporate training

Corporate managers are constantly looking for more effective and efficient ways to deliver training to their employees. Traditional classroom methods have been used for a long time. However, in the last decade electronic learning technology has gained in significance. Serious Games are games that educate, train and inform using entertainment principles, creativity, and technology. Serious Games are proven as a learning method for conveying skills on complex tasks by incorporating sound learning and pedagogical principles into their design and structure. Therefore, it is believed that Serious Games have got the potential to be used to meet government or corporate training objectives. However, the awareness and adoption level of serious games by industry is not known. In this research we designed and conducted a pilot survey among UK-based companies. We used the survey in order to assess the level of awareness and adoption of Serious Games in companies for corporate training. We aim to understand what kinds of skills development Serious Games-based trainings are desired by companies and to know what they perceive the benefits and barriers of using Serious Games are in companies. This paper describes the stages of the design of the survey questionnaire, presents and analyses the results and ends with conclusions and a discussion about the future research work