Customer Journeys: A Systematic Literature Review

Purpose – Customer journeys has become an increasingly important topic in service management and design. The study reviews customer journey terminology and approaches within the research literature prior to 2013, mainly from the fields of design, management, and marketing. Design/methodology/approach - The study was conducted as a systematic literature review. Searches in Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, ACM Digital Library, and ScienceDirect identified 45 papers for analysis. The papers were analysed with respect to customer journey terminology and approaches, the relation to customer experience, the referenced background, and the use of visualizations. Findings – Across the reviewed literature, customer journeys are described not only as a means to take the viewpoint of the customer, but also to reach insight into their experiences. A rich and at times incoherent customer journey terminology is analysed and discussed, as are two emerging customer journey approaches: customer journey mapping (analysis of a service process "as is") and customer journey proposition (generative activities leading towards a possible service "to be"). Research limitations/implications – The review is limited to analysing and making claims on research papers that explicitly apply the term customer journey. In most of the reviewed papers, customer journeys are not the main object of interest but are discussed as one of several topics. Practical implications - A nuanced discussion of customer journey terminology and approaches is provided, supporting the practical application of a customer journey perspective. Originality/value - The review contributes a needed common basis for future customer journey research and practice.acceptedVersio

Online User Feedback in Early Phases of the Design Process: Lessons Learnt from Four Design Cases

Online user feedback, collected by means of internet survey tools, is a promising approach to obtain early user feedback on concepts and early prototypes. In this study, the collection and utilization of online user feedback was investigated in four design cases: all master student projects for industry clients involving seven student designers. A total of 272 user participants provided quantitative feedback. Half of these also provided qualitative feedback. One third of the qualitative feedback was perceived as useful by the student designers. The main usefulness of the feedback was related to strategic concept decisions rather than the interaction design of the early prototype. Lessons learnt are provided

Customer journeys

The customer journey concept concerns the process of service provision from the customer perspective. Here, the service process is analyzed in terms of its concrete customer interactions, so called touchpoints, typically with reference to how these impact customer experience. There has been a steep increase in interest in the customer journey concept since its emergence in industry and government practices in the 1990s, and the use of customer journey approaches is considered a core competency in customer experience management across public- and private sector service provisioning. In recent research on customer journeys, emphasis has been put on how to explore and map existing customer journeys, how to understand service failure and recovery, and how customer experience develops across the customer journey. In this entry we provide an overview of the customer journey concept and related terms, current approaches to applying customer journeys, and relevant future research directions.acceptedVersio

Business and pleasure? Relational interaction in conversational UX

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Investigating the user experience of customer service chatbot interaction: a framework for qualitative analysis of chatbot dialogues

The uptake of chatbots for customer service depends on the user experience. For such chatbots, user experience in particular concerns whether the user is provided relevant answers to their queries and the chatbot interaction brings them closer to resolving their problem. Dialogue data from interactions between users and chatbots represents a potentially valuable source of insight into user experience. However, there is a need for knowledge of how to make use of these data. Motivated by this, we present a framework for qualitative analysis of chatbot dialogues in the customer service domain. The framework has been developed across several studies involving two chatbots for customer service, in collaboration with the chatbot hosts. We present the framework and illustrate its application with insights from three case examples. Through the case findings, we show how the framework may provide insight into key drivers of user experience, including response relevance and dialogue helpfulness (Case 1), insight to drive chatbot improvement in practice (Case 2), and insight of theoretical and practical relevance for understanding chatbot user types and interaction patterns (Case 3). On the basis of the findings, we discuss the strengths and limitations of the framework, its theoretical and practical implications, and directions for future work.publishedVersio

Political Social Media Sites as Public Sphere: A Case Study of the Norwegian Labour Party

Political interest and voter turnout is in steady decline. In an attempt to renew interest for political matters, political parties and governments have attempted to create new digital meeting places, with the hope that social media can contribute to renew the public sphere and thereby increase political awareness in the population. Communicating in new media demands adaption to the culture of the new medium, and the networked nature of the Internet poses challenges to old ways of thinking as we can no longer talk about one public sphere but rather a networked public sphere consisting of a multitude of discussion spaces. In this article, we contribute to the understanding of the networked public sphere and online political communication through a case study of MyLaborParty.no, a social network run by a Norwegian political party. Our findings indicate that political parties can create a thriving part of the networked public sphere, as long as they invite opposing voices to the discussion, communicate using the genres which facilitate discussion and have users or moderators who help spread ideas between discussion spaces

Chatbots as Part of Digital Government Service Provision – A User Perspective

Chatbots are taken up as part of digital government service provision. While the success of chatbots for this purpose depends on these being accepted by their intended users, there is a lack of knowledge concerning user perceptions of such chatbots and the implications of these for intention to use. In response to this, an exploratory qualitative interview study was conducted with 15 users of a chatbot for municipality service provision. The interviews showed the importance of performance expectations, effort expectations, and trust. In particular, while a municipality chatbot supporting service triaging may be perceived as beneficial for their availability and to provide support navigation of municipality services and information, this benefit is compared by users to the benefit of other digital government channels. On the basis of the findings, we present key implications to theory and practice, and suggest avenues for future research.acceptedVersio

Chasing the Chatbots: Directions for Interaction and Design Research

Big tech-players have been successful in pushing the chatbots forward. Investments in the technology are growing fast, as well as the number of users and applications available. Instead of driving investments towards a successful diffusion of the technology, user-centred studies are currently chasing the popularity of chatbots. A literature analysis evidences how recent this research topic is, and the predominance of technical challenges rather than understanding users’ perceptions, expectations and contexts of use. Looking for answers to interaction and design questions raised in 2007, when the presence of clever computers in everyday life had been predicted for the year 2020, this paper presents a panorama of the recent literature, revealing gaps and pointing directions for further user-centred research

Putting a Face on Algorithms: Personas for Modeling Artificial Intelligence

We propose a new type of personas, artificial intelligence (AI) personas, as a tool for designing systems consisting of both human and AI agents. Personas are commonly used in design practices for modelling users. We argue that the personification of AI agents can help multidisciplinary teams in understanding and designing systems that include AI agents. We propose a process for creating AI personas and the properties they should include, and report on our first experience using them. The case we selected for our exploration of AI personas was the design of a highly automated decision support tool for air traffic control. Our first results indicate that AI personas helped designers to empathise with algorithms and enabled better communication within a team of designers and AI and domain experts. We call for a research agenda on AI personas and discussions on potential benefits and pitfalls of this approach.acceptedVersio