Navigating the Services Technology Landscape

1. Chapter 3 Plugging into the Information Age

2. Objectives • To explore the services economy and the information age • To show how services marketers can use information technology as an employee tool for improving customer service and increasing productivity • To demonstrate how services marketers can enlist information technology to empower their customers • To explain how information technology can help bridge the physical distance between organization and customer and enable the interactive experience

3. Objectives (cont’d) • To illustrate the various ways in which services marketers can employ information technology to learn more about their customers and respond to them more effectively • To caution service organizations regarding the negative impact of technology • To convey the many challenges of using technology to manage customer interfaces in service industries

4. Outline • Introduction • Services and the Information Age • Enabling the Interactive Experience • Curating Customer Information • Coping with Negative Impacts of Services Technology • Challenges of Using Technology to Manage Customer Interfaces • Summary and Conclusion

5. Services and theInformation Age

6. Services and theInformation Age (cont’d) • Technology in the Core Service • Technology as a Supplementary Service Support Tool

7. Enabling the Interactive Experience

8. Empowering EmployeesThrough Technology • Technology Devices • Networking

9. Empowering the Customer • Self-service machines, such as vending or automated teller machines (ATMs) • Computerized service delivery systems • Intelligent agents • Service robots

10. Curating Customer Information • Advances in information technology have allowed organizations to collect large quantities of information about customers and to create and deliver customer services hitherto unimaginable. • It has also become possible to move from mass marketing to targeting individuals.

11. Curating CustomerInformation (cont’d) • Customer databases require several steps: • Group customers into categories: current customers, prospective customers, and lapsed customers • Data on the recency and frequency of each customer's purchases • Data on each customer's purchases over a period of about twelve months • Data on relevant customer information that will improve the company's ability to serve customer needs (preferred sizes, birthdays, credit card numbers, etc.)

12. Curating CustomerInformation (cont’d) • Uses • Tracking customers' purchase patterns • Make purchase patterns easily accessible to the frontline service provider • Cautions • Services marketers need to be very cautious about privacy issues as they create and use customer databases

13. Coping with Negative Impactsof Services Technology • Technology will continue to play a critical role in service organizations’ competitive position. • Service organizations often find that they have implemented new technology systems only to discover they have made no provisions for the absence of the technology during a power failure. • Services employment levels may fall in absolute terms as technology replaces workers or reduces the need for workers.

14. Challenges of Using Technologyto Manage Customer Interfaces • Weak links in technological customer interfaces • Steps for improving the technology of customer interfaces

15. Weak Links in Customer Interfaces • Automated Idiocy • The rush to automate service functions often leads to systems that automatically do stupid things. • Time Sink • New services technology can steal valuable time from the technology user. • Law of the Hammer • Based on the idea that a small child with a hammer sees everything as a nail. Technology can be used too much! • An obsession with too many “bells and whistles”

16. Weak Links inCustomer Interfaces (cont’d) • Technology Lock • Technological designs persist long after their functional value is gone. • Last Inch • Many customer interface problems occur at the point of contact between the customer and the technology. • Hi-Tech Versus Hi-Touch • Customers face a confusing set of automated instructions when they really need to speak to a human being and not to a machine. Phone mail can become “phone jail.”

17. Steps for Improving theTechnology of Customer Interfaces • Provide marketer input into the technology of customer interface design • The marketer can help prevent design problems • Stay customer-focused, not machine-focused • Essential to successful customer interface design • Make services technology invisible to the customer • Place technology in the background • Insist on flexible design • Insist on designs that offer employees and customers maximum flexibility

18. Web Sites • Apple (http://www.apple.com), p. 34 & 36 • Amazon (http://www.amazon.com), p. 35 • eBay (http://www.ebay.com), p. 35 • Google (http://www.google.com), p. 35 • Facebook (http://www.facebook.com), p. 35 & 38 • Youtube (http://www.youtube.com), p. 35 • TED (http://www.ted.com), p. 35

19. Web Sites (cont’d) • Wall Street Journal • Interactive edition (http://www.wsj.com), p. 37 • Careers resource (http://www.careerjournal.com), p. 37 • LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com), p. 38 • AT&T (http://www.att.com), p. 38 • Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency (http://www.ogilvy.com), p. 38 • HotWired (http://www.hotwired.com), p. 38

20. Web Sites (cont’d) • Siebel Systems (http://www.siebel.com), p. 38 • MySpace (http://www.myspace.com), p. 38 • Newscorp (http://www.newscorp.com), p. 38 • Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com), p. 39

21. Web Sites (cont’d) • FedEx (http://www.fedex.com), p. 40 • American Airlines (http://www.aa.com), p. 40 • Travelocity (http://www.travelocity.com), p. 40 • Dell Computers (http://www.dell.com), p. 41 • Expedia (http://www.expedia.com), p. 43 • Get Human (http://www.gethuman.com/us/), p. 43