Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Int. J. Electronic Business, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2009 237
Copyright © 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping
Ron Sperling Aepex (research conducted during employment at TNO ICT), P.O. Box 2011 4200 BA Gorichem, The Netherlands Fax: +31-183-693-737 E-mail: [email protected]
Luuk P.A. Simons* and Harry Bouwman Information and Communication Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5015, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands Fax: +31-15 278 7168 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.harrybouwman.nl *Corresponding author
Abstract: Although multi-channel shopping has become normal for customers, firms are struggling with consciously designing their multi-channel mix. Design methods are useful to improve the design process. This paper proceeds from an existing method which identifies multi-channel customer needs and functional requirements, based on Quality Function Deployment (QFD). We created a follow-up method for specifying detailed navigation structures and web page design. Participants from three cases evaluated our method based on five criteria. Valuable for the design process is the combination of speed, customer orientation, involvement of relevant stakeholders, plus the visualisation of multi-channel and technical issues in an e-service prototype.
Keywords: service design; e-services; multi-channel; design method; QFD; quality function deployment; prototyping; persona; electronic business.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Sperling, R., Simons, L.P.A. and Bouwman, H. (2009) ‘Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping’, Int. J. Electronic Business, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp.237–255.
Biographical notes: R. Sperling worked at TNO ICT during the course of this research. Currently, he is business consultant at Aepex Business Consultants B.V. He received his BSc and MSc Degrees in Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management from Delft University of Technology. During his study he specialised in the area of e-business and the design of e-services. His focus as business consultant lies in supply chain management information systems in inter-organisational contexts with a focus on sales, distribution, financials and controlling.
238 R. Sperling et al.
Luuk P.A. Simons is senior researcher at Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, ICT-Department, with extensive industry experience as managing consultant. He received his MSc and MA from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, in 1996. He won the “Technology and Society award of the KivI” (Dutch Royal Institute for Engineers). His PhD won the Innovation Award of the German QFD Institute and he received several ‘Best Paper’ awards. His research interests are in the areas of e-commerce, service design, services marketing, multi-channel distribution management, QFD and value sensitive design.
Harry Bouwman is Interim Chair and Associate Professor at Information and Communication Technology Section, Faculty Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, and Privat Docent, at the Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research, Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. He published 17 books and about 150 academic journal papers on ICT and organisations, business architectures, business models, customer value, and network formation, specifically with regard to 3G+ Mobile telecommunications services, and mobile web services.
1 Introduction
In recent years, consumers have increasingly become multi-channel shoppers. In 2004, Forrester Research found that 65% of US consumers searched online and bought online (Wilson, 2004). And the other way around: 69% of US shoppers in 2006 used offline orientation before buying online (Smits, 2006). Still, firms struggle with consciously designing an optimal channel mix (Latzer and Schmitz, 2004). In this paper, we view channels from the perspective of marketing channels, defined as “sets of (independent) organisations, involved in the process of making a product or service available for consumption and use” (Stern et al., 1996).
Organisations face several challenges in designing internet services, or e-services, which have to function in a multi-channel context. This is due to: time pressures (Gordijn, 2002), an ill-structured design process and challenges in ensuring customer centricity (Ramaswamy, 1996). This results in service failures or loss-generating services (Simons and Bouwman, 2005). Besides, organisations have to arrange their service delivery in such a way that all the channels via which the service is delivered are complementary to each other: for example, information via the internet, personal advice via call centres and product pick up in stores. Thus, organisations have to find the right channel mix.
Design methods are useful to improve the process for developing e-services within a multi-channel context. The design and development process can be described in the phases: initiation, development and implementation (Hevner et al., 2004). This paper proceeds from an existing initiation phase method previously labelled ‘Xtended QFD’ (Simons and Bouwman, 2006) and more recently Multi-Channel QFD’ or ‘MuCh-QFD’ (Simons, 2006; Simons and Bouwman, 2006). It identifies multi-channel customer needs and functional requirements, based on Quality Function Deployment (QFD). We created a follow-up method for the development phase, to be used by teams for specifying detailed navigation structures and web page design. Both the initiation and the
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 239
development phase method were given the form of a design session. In the remainder of this paper, the new, follow up session will be called ‘development (phase) session’ and the MuCh-QFD session will by contrast be referred to as ‘initiation (phase) session’.
Our design point of view also implies that design science methodology principles must be applied (Alter, 1999). Apart from creating something new (a new service design approach) based on existing knowledge and applying it to a given situation, we also attempt to validate whether the design tasks within our new approach have the effects we expected. The objective of this paper is to develop (Section 3) and test (Sections 4 and 5) the development phase session. Our research questions are:
• What are the requirements for the development phase session?
• What are design tasks to fulfil the requirements?
• Do those tasks perform as expected?
The theory (Section 2) describes design approaches we used and Section 3 shows the resulting design method. Methodology (Section 4) describes the way we selected the design cases and how we collected data. Finally, we present our results (Section 5), discuss our research (Section 6) and draw conclusions (Section 7).
2 Theory: design methods
The development phase session is based on different design approaches like QFD (Ramaswamy, 1996; Mazur, 1993; Mizuno and Akao, 1994; Akao, 1997; Cohen, 1995), the STOF method which designs Service, Technology, Organisation and Finance in coherence (Faber et al., 2003), User Centered Design (UCD) (ISO 13407, 1999), and UML and requirements engineering (Hull et al., 2002). Starting from these approaches, we focus on possibilities to perform design tasks with groups of technical and non-technical professionals. Too often, design (language and methods) becomes highly specialised, which excludes non-technicians (Herzwurm et al., 2002). We aim to use language and methods that can form a bridge across disciplines.
QFD, which originated in Japan, is a customer-centred design methodology for designing quality products and services (Akao, 1997). It builds on the idea that quality should be considered early in the design process (Clausing, 1994). It uses a matrix format, ‘the House of Quality’ that is filled during the design process. In this matrix customer needs are used to evaluate importance of functions, see also Figure 2. ‘The House of Quality’ helps a design team to communicate with each other, even when their backgrounds are different.
Faber et al. (2003) describe a framework, the so-called STOF-model, which consists of four components that need attention during the design of a new electronic service. The first component is service design, providing a description of the value that is offered to a specific target group of users, by means of a service offering. The next step is technology design: a description of the technical architecture, which is needed to deliver the service offering exhibited in the service design. Next is organisation design: a description of the configuration of actors (the value network) that is needed to deliver the particular resources and capabilities to deliver the service, the roles that each actor plays, making clear how the actor network creates value for end-users. And finally, finance issues are addressed: a description of how a value network intends to capture
240 R. Sperling et al.
monetary value from a particular service offering and how risks, investments and revenues are divided over the different actors of a value network. Faber et al. (2003) state that design issues within and between the four components must be balanced. Choices made in one component, influence other components. That is why it is important to address all components at the start of the design process.
UCD, or human-centred design, is a widely used term to refer to a development where users are involved early in the design process. A general definition of human-centred design is published as ISO 13407 (1999). It lists the following principles for UCD:
• active involvement of users and understanding of user and task requirements
• an appropriate allocation of functions between users and technology
• the iteration of design solutions
• multidisciplinary approach.
Translating a design concept to a real artifact often leads to problems; in literature this is called ‘the gap’ (Cooper and Reimann, 2003). In a UCD process, instead of spending time on setting up specifications, early in the design process some kind of prototype is created. This is done to receive feedback of users and based on this, improve the concept.
Cooper and Reimann (2003) mentions use case scenarios as a tool that can help in this translation. Cooper defines this tool as “making use of a specific story to both construct and illustrate design solutions”. The ultimate goals are to get more insight in which task a user must be able to carry out and how the user wants to do this. However, because of the fact that the drawing of scenarios is time-consuming a task analysis can be an alternative (Hull et al., 2002).
To define the tasks for a user it can be useful to make use of personas: “a precise descriptive model of the user, what he wishes to accomplish, and why” (Cooper and Reimann, 2003). When a persona is drawn, during the design process choices can be made based on the preferences of the persona. Because the persona is a symbol for the whole target group, choices are always made from the user’s perspective. Another advantage of a persona is that it simplifies the communication within a (multidisciplinary) team.
3 Creation of the development phase session
This section first summarises the MuCh-QFD session which precedes the development phase session (3.1). Next, it addresses our first two research questions:
• In Section 3.2: What are the requirements for the development phase session, based on feedback from business participants with previous MuCh-QFD experience?
• In Section 3.3: What are the design tasks of the new multi-channel development phase session and how are they expected to contribute to the design requirements?
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 241
3.1 Summary of MuCh-QFD, the initiation phase session
The MuCh-QFD initiation phase session is preceded by an intake. The intake addresses tasks like: identification of main objectives, the scope of the service idea and its target segment of customers, a high level business case and listing the main stakeholders that have to be involved in the rest of the design process, see Figure 1. Following the intake, the actual design session takes place. The MuCh-QFD session makes customer priorities explicit and links them to choices on multi-channel functions. Throughout the session an electronic decision support system, GroupSystems™, is used to structure and speed up the process.
Figure 1 MuCh-QFD design tasks
The MuCh-QFD session starts with presenting the results of the intake to the team, see also Table 1. This is the moment when a shared starting point is created and where potential unclarities can be addressed as a group. Then the design tasks start. Part I of the agenda identifies the main customer needs and e-service functions. In part II customer needs are used to evaluate the importance of functions, the service proposition is summarised in a service slogan and potential constraints and solutions for functions are discussed. Part III provides a multi-channel extension to QFD. It explores the support that customers desire from other channels and the potential for cooperation between channels. On the basis of this, the service matrix from part II is extended with multi-channel customer needs and functions, while logging additional constraints and solutions mentioned by the group. In part IV competitive positioning is discussed in relation to the main two competitors. This is followed by scoring the new service definition as well as the competitor services in relation to customer needs.
Following QFD tradition (Ramaswamy, 1996; Mazur, 1993; Mizuno and Akao, 1994; Akao, 1997), one of its main outputs, alongside a comparison with competitor services in relation to customer priorities, is a ‘service matrix’, illustrated in Figure 2, which gauges the contribution of multi-channel functionality in relation to customer priorities, and thus creates a weighted prioritisation of functions.
242 R. Sperling et al.
The correlation method follows Pugh method, with 9’s for strong contributions and 3’s for weaker contributions as judged by the design team. This follows standard QFD practice, see Ramaswamy (1996). Next, functions are ranked by multiplying customer needs weights with the contribution scores (9’s and 3’s). In the MuCh-QFD method, the matrix contains internet as well as other channel functions. The competitor analysis evaluates performance of the new service concept in relation to customer priorities (weighted needs) when compared to the old service concept and two main competitors, see also (Ramaswamy, 1996; Mizuno and Akao, 1994; Hagenaars and Segers, 1980).
Table 1 Summary of MuCh-QFD session
Agenda item
Introduction: summary of intake results
I: Identify customer needs and internet functions
II: Define e-service Correlate functions and needs in service matrix
Define service slogan that summarises proposition
Discuss solutions and constraints for functions
III: Tasks of other channels
Check the desired support from other channels
Check win-win between e-service and other channels Extend matrix: multi-channel needs and functions
IV: Competitive position
Strong and weak points in relation to competitors
Score new and competing services on customer needs
Figure 2 Service matrix illustration (see online version for colours)
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 243
3.2 Defining requirements for the development phase session
As a basis for generating the requirements for the development phase session, we used inputs from business participants which had experience with the initiation phase session. In previous research we tested the initiation phase session with six company cases (Simons and Bouwman, 2006). The evaluations with the business participants from these cases provided insights in the design support needs for the development session. We used several ways to collect data from these participants. Firstly, immediately after the initiation sessions participants completed a questionnaire and explained their answers in face-to-face interviews with the researchers. One of the questions was how complete the session was and what might be added. Secondly, participants from each case had a debriefing session with the researchers approximately one month after the session. Again, participants were asked what they thought of the design session and output. Thirdly, a half-year later, in depth interviews have been conducted with six of the participants to gather their needs and requirements regarding the development phase session.
As a result of these rounds of data collection, five requirements were defined for the development phase session. Firstly, the three areas where MuCh-QFD was judged to have its main contributions, were also seen as important for the development session:
1 Customer oriented design.
2 Channel coherence and synergy.
3 Contribution to communication of concept coherence to others. Next, there were two additional requirements specifically for the development session.
4 Further specification of the service concept (and creation of a visual prototype).
5 Technical integration.
As an illustration of the specification requirement (4), the following issues were mentioned by the business participants: elaborate functions (mentioned 3 times), build a prototype of the e-service (2 times), draw scenarios (2 times), draw a flow of the interface of the e-service (1 time). Concerns related to the technical integration requirement had to do with back office connections and links between channels supporting cross channel referals, information flows and consistency.
3.3 Creation of the development phase session
The main purpose of the development phase session is to specify and visualise the service concept defined in the initiation session. The agenda of the afternoon session is presented in Table 2. In the text below the design tasks are explained, including their links with theory and their expected contributions.
The afternoon session starts in item V with the creation of a hierarchical overview of the functions that were defined in the initiation session (Hull et al., 2002). Functional hierarchy is found in both QFD and UML theory. In agenda item VI, one or more personas are designed, including what they want to accomplish and why (Cooper and Reimann, 2003). Personas are an extension to UCD. These personas are used as a basis for agenda item VII to elaborate on user tasks. During this item the tasks that an end user should be able to carry out are defined, plus the steps within tasks (Hull et al., 2002).
244 R. Sperling et al.
Detailed task analysis can be found in several design methods: in UML and IT related requirements engineering, in service design methods like service blueprinting (Ramaswamy, 1996; Shostack, 1984) and in UCD.
Table 2 Agenda of development phase session and underlying design theories
Agenda item Design theory
V: Identify hierarchy of functions QFD, UML VI: Designing persona(s) UCD, persona VII: Elaborate tasks UCD, service blueprinting, UML VIII: Screen sketches of storyboard UCD IX: Highlight multi-channel issues MuCh-QFD, STOF X: Technical integration STOF XI: Roles and parties in actor network STOF XII: Project plan Alter (Hevner et al., 2004)
In agenda item VIII a storyboard is created. Following the principles of UCD it is important to make a tangible ‘prototype’ of an artifact as early as possible. The intangible character of an e-service is one of the aspects that makes it hard to design a service. To get a visual impression of the e-service, the first sketches of this user interface, the website, are made. This is done based on the tasks that are defined in the previous agenda item. Screens are drawn for the main tasks and their sub-steps, thus creating a storyboard.
In item IX, the multi-channel issues discussed in the morning are highlighted per screen in the storyboards. This integrates user tasks across channels and makes channel contributions very specific (Gordijn, 2002). It also links contributions accros organisations and departments, as also found in the STOF approach. In agenda item X, the same is done for the technical integration of the e-services: links with other, external systems are discussed. Thus, connections are made from the level of functions, to the levels of processes and supporting systems (Ramaswamy, 1996). This is part of the technical design described by Faber et al. (2003): the ‘T’ of the STOF model. A high level organisational design is addressed in agenda item XI were roles and actors are listed: the ‘O’ in the STOF model. The session ends with the formulation of a high level plan for service development. On the one hand we expect this to aid the subsequent design process, on the other hand it is an important aspect of a design process, according to Alter (Hevner et al., 2004).
Like Figure 2, Table 3 uses QFD scoring conventions (Ramaswamy, 1996) to show expected contributions of the design tasks in relation to the design requirements. Regarding multi-channel and technical integration issues, design progress is expected to be relatively localised. It mostly occurs after storyboarding is done. Contributions to customer orientation, communication and specification are seen as more spread out through the agenda, although the main impacts are expected in the early design tasks leading up to the storyboard. In short, storyboarding fulfills a pivotal role in the design activity of the follow-up session.
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 245
Table 3 Expected contributions of design tasks
Design requirements Rela
tion
func
tions
Pers
ona(
s)
Task
s
Stor
yboa
rd
Mul
ti-ch
anne
l lin
ks
Tech
nica
l in
tegr
atio
n
Role
s
Proj
ect p
lan
1 Customer orientation 3 9 9 9 3 2 Channel coherence and synergy 3 9 3 3 3 Communication 9 3 9 3 3 3 4 Specification of concept 3 9 9 3 3 3 5 Technical integration 3 9 3
9 = strong; 3 = moderate contribution – authors’ opinion.
4 Methodology for development session validation
This research is a two-phase study: first we investigated the design support needs for the development phase and developed a session (as described in the previous section). Next, we validated if the new development session performed as expected. The methodology for validation is described in this section.
Evaluation of the new development phase multi-channel session took place in two parts. First, the session was pre-tested with a student group. This led to minor modifications. The resulting session format is the one described in Section 3. Next, the session was tested with three large companies, see Table 4. During every session each stakeholder perspective was represented by a different person (customer focus, channel focus, marketing focus, operations/IT focus, and sometimes sales or service focus), ensuring that a multi-disciplinary team was present. The intake was held with one person of the design team, several weeks before the design sessions. The selection of case C, mortgage calculation, was more opportunistic and driven by a service idea from a previous training session with the same group. Hence for case C no real intake was held, and the service idea was presented in a short written document plus presentation. For every case a different facilitator was used. All these facilitators had previous experience with facilitating groups and using MuCh-QFD. More substantive details on the cases will be presented in Section 5.
Table 4 Overview of cases
Case Sector
A: Employees portal (n = 4) Employment agency B: Secure message portal (n = 4) Insurance C: Mortgage calculation (n = 8) Insurance
Data on performance of the development session were obtained via a multi-method approach. Firstly, participants were asked to fill in questionnaires on satisfaction and usefulness of agenda items in relation to the design requirements (during the session,
246 R. Sperling et al.
and during debriefing approximately two weeks after each session). Secondly, an individual interview with the participants was held directly after filling in the questionnaires, based on the answers given. Thirdly, two persons analysed the output of the sessions. Attention was given to the quantity (e.g., number of screens) and quality (level of detail etc) of the output.
Finally, we attempted to extract design knowledge in the form of ‘technological rules’ based on our case observations. According to van Aken (2005), it is important to use the rich context of design cases to extract design knowledge in the form of ‘technological rules’ or ‘solution concepts’. Such rules follow the logic of “if you want to achieve Y in situation Z, perform action X”. The qualifier ‘in situation Z’ is where the researchers’ interpretations are important. Although this is theory generation rather than validation, this activity does help, by placing the findings in their larger design context.
5 Results
The results of the three ‘field experiments’ are described in three steps. First we describe how the design tasks of the prototyping session contributed to the design requirements (customer orientation, multi-channel coherence and synergy, concept communication, more detailed service specification, and technical integration) according to the business participants. Next, we discuss design outputs. Finally, we extract design knowledge or ‘technological rules’ based on our experiences across the three cases.
5.1 Contributions to design requirements
First we evaluate the prototyping session in relation to the design requirements:
• customer orientation
• multi-channel coherence and synergy
• concept communication
• detailed service concept specification
• technical integration.
A leading question for each of these requirements is whether the design tasks have the contributions we expected.
Figure 3 shows percentage agreement of participants on the question how much design tasks contribute to requirement 1, customer orientation. Results are largely in line with expectations listed in Table 3. Exceptions are the personas task, which participants judge to be not very supportive of customer orientation, and identifying functional hierarchy, which was judged more useful than expected. Regarding requirement 2, channel coherence and synergy, the results were as expected (94% agreement on the contribution of item IX, multi-channel issues, 56% on item X, technical integration, and 35% for storyboarding and for roles; not illustrated in a figure).
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 247
Figure 3 Contributions to customer orientation (see online version for colours)
For requirement 3, communication, most scores are as expected: 69% contribution for storyboarding and 56% for personas. Unexpected was that the highest scores were for item V, defining hierarchy relations between functions (75%), and item VII, defining tasks (75%; not illustrated). According to participants those detailed specifications are very important for being able to communicate the service concept to others.
In Figure 4 participant opinions for requirement 4, specification of service concept, are presented. The scores are largely as expected, except that technical integration, roles of other parties and the hierarchy between functions were less viewed by participants as contributing to the service specification: they value the visual tasks more for this requirement. Finally, the contributions to requirement 5, technical integration, were as expected (a 100% score for agenda item X, technical integration, and a 56% score for item IX, multi-channel issues; not illustrated in a figure).
Figure 4 Contributions to service concept specification (see online version for colours)
248 R. Sperling et al.
5.2 Design outputs
One of the most notable outputs is formed by the visual prototype. The development session creates significant design progress towards the prototype: based on the Web screen sketches, static interface prototyping only takes a few hours. In Figure 5 two screens from a resulting prototype are shown. The column on the left contains the main menu items of the e-service, which correlates with the functional hierarchy as specified in agenda item V. The call outs are used to indicate either multi-channel connections, technical integration issues, explanations of functionality, conditions for functions to appear or not, and navigational links.
Figure 5 Prototype example screens (see online version for colours)
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 249
Participants indicated in response to these prototypes, which were created after the sessions, that
• they recognised and appreciated how their design discussions and decisions had received prototype impacts in a transparent way via the process used
• they judged the prototype to be a useful way to develop and communicate the service concept and its details regarding multi-channeling, technology and service processes.
Other outputs generated during the day are the multi-channel service matrix plus preliminary competitive positioning analysis from the MuCh-QFD initiation session, and actor analysis plus project plan from the development session. Participants’ opinions of the value of the service matrix of the initiation session were clearly positive. The main reason for usefulness of the initiation session is: starting from customer priorities, explicitly connecting them to service functionality priorities in the matrix, incorporating multi-channel needs and functions, connecting stakeholder interests (of customers, channel partners and product providers) and aiding communication of design decisions to others after the session with the use of the matrix. By contrast, the added value of actor analysis plus project planning strongly varied per case. An important reason for the mixed responses to actor analysis plus project planning, appears to be that some organisations have formal project planning and governance processes in place (which means duplication of those design tasks in the session), whereas case A (and some cases with which we previously tested the initiation session) lacked formal project planning and governance, making it convenient to create a head start in the session.
5.3 Design knowledge via case observations
As a final case analysis activity (see also Section 4), we attempt to place our case observations in their larger design context by extracting ‘technological rules’. According to van Aken (2005), it is important to use the rich context of design cases to extract design knowledge in the form of ‘technological rules’. Such rules follow the logic of “if you want to achieve Y in situation Z, perform action X”. We now describe the particularities per case insofar as they illustrate specific design mechanisms and technological rules.
Case A: Employees portal
For case A, employees portal, the multi-channel discussions appeared relatively easy for participants, in comparison to other cases. The participants were relatively well acquainted with customer interactions at the branch offices. This contrasts nicely with case B, where even the person from the multi-channel department had limited experience with and feeling for multi-channel needs and experiences of customers. Hence, closeness to customers appears to stimulate multi-channel thinking. The technological rule would be, in addition to the advice of having multi-disciplinary teams:
“When designing multi-channel service concepts, especially for organizations with many functional specialists (marketing, IT, processes), put people with daily customer contact experience in the team.”
Secondly, what stands out in this case is that the last items of the day (define needed roles and parties, and formulation of project plan) were more appreciated than in the other two cases. In the other companies, appreciation was lower since formal,
250 R. Sperling et al.
centralised planning cycles were in place. Hence the absence of formal, centralised project planning processes in companies appears to increase the usefulness of the last two agenda items. The technological rule would be:
“When making a multi-channel implementation plan, and centralized project control is absent in the organization, then use the opportunity of having a broad stakeholder representation with service concept acquaintance for ‘organizational design’ (Faber et al., 2003) and project planning.”
Case B: Secure message portal
In case B, secure message portal, participants were particularly enthusiastic about the use of Group Systems™ and the strict processes of information generation and prioritisation during the initiation session. They indicated that in their (very large) company design decisions generally take much longer and are less focused than during our sessions. Group Systems™-based process support appears particularly useful for large organisations with multi-party decision-making processes. The technological rule: When supporting multi-party decision making in large organisation, develop a strict process for information generation and prioritisation using (a decision support system like) Group Systems™. Secondly, participants in this case were initially struggling with the multi-channel items (during morning and afternoon), but explicitly appreciated them. It was called ‘out-of-the-box thinking’. This was especially remarkable because of the fact that one of the participants did work in the multi-channel department of the company. This illustrates a more general observation: in large organisations, experience with multi-channel customer needs and daily service practices is sometimes hardly present at those who are responsible for channel services and multi-channel mix. This relates back to the first technological rule of case A, employees portal: involve people with extensive customer interaction experience. Thirdly, the persona item (VI) showed its value in increasing participation and ownership. One participant, who had been quiet and skeptical so far, became very enthusiastic during this item and enhanced his contribution. We propose a technological rule related to this finding in the overall case analysis, which follows after case C.
Case C: Mortgage calculation
As explained in the methodology section, this case was executed in a slightly different way. For case C, mortgage calculation, no real intake was held, and the group did not ‘own’ the service idea. It was presented to them in a short written document plus presentation. The morning session was conducted with a group of eight people. In the afternoon session, the group was split in two groups of four. These groups worked in parallel, and each had one facilitator. Some of the participants had limited experience with the context of the service and they mentioned that it was hard to stay focused. Hence, a technological rule from other research (Simons and Bouwman, 2006), “select participants who feel ownership for the service concept”, is confirmed.
Secondly, one of the groups tried to design a storyboard based on a real person, a colleague (who participated in the other group). This proves to be impractical: it resulted in finding out what the facts were, instead of using creativity. The technological rule: when using personas for design: keep them fictional and make sure they remain a means to help the team explicate user goals, context and tasks.
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 251
Overall
All participants were equally satisfied with the MuCh-QFD and the prototyping sessions (MuCh-QFD: avg. 7.2 when asked for a grade on a scale of 1–10, stand. dev. 0.7; prototyping: avg. 7.3, stand. dev. 0.8), where case A: Employees portal, scored relatively highest (avg. 8 for both sessions). The difference was not significant (due to small number of observations). Several weeks after the sessions the same grades were given: participant satisfaction had not changed. Satisfaction questions on process and outcomes on a 7-point Likert scale showed similar results. Process satisfaction varied from 5.3 to 5.7 across cases and instances (initiation session, development session and debriefing). And outcome satisfaction varied from 5.0 to 5.8 across sessions and instances. Next, participants indicated (except for three ‘neutrals’) that the prototyping session was a (very) useful continuation of MuCh-QFD, by aiding the processes of detailing and communicating the service concept.
Our tests confirm that closing ‘the gap’ mentioned in literature between concept and a real design (Clausing, 1994) requires additional design activity and that steps towards a visual prototype add value. The technological rule: when designing a (multi-channel) service concept, use functional hierarchies plus storyboards to generate and visualise the overall service structure, next use the storyboard to pinpoint and discuss multi-channel, technology and other issues on a more detailed level.
In terms of the form chosen for the design tasks, both sessions were quite different. The MuCh-QFD initiation session received praise for the degree of focus and progression created with the aid of GroupSystems™. The development session had many typical ‘creativity tasks’ where the group had for example to draw a persona and list personality traits, or to draw web pages throughout a storyboard. This resulted in high participation levels.
The design tasks of the prototyping session perform largely as expected, except for the personas item (VI), for which we received mixed signals. In the questionnaire participants indicate that it does not contribute directly to customer orientation. At the same time participants indicate after the session that it helps as a basis for design decisions like a task analysis or discussing multi-channel issues. Hence, it appears that the use of a persona happens mostly implicitly. On the one hand this may be a disadvantage: if the contribution of a design method is unclear, this model will hamper adoption and maybe even adequate use. On the other hand it may also be a strong point: focusing the design in a way that ‘feels natural’. It appears that a technological rule specific for personas is that the method requires special explanatory attention when used in a context of design tasks with a more strictly functional focus. The value of the last two items of the agenda, discussing roles and project planning, appears to depend heavily on existing company practices. The technological rule: when a company has formal project planning and governance in place, do not include the tasks of project planning and actor analysis in the development session.
Looking at MuCh-QFD and prototyping sessions together, we found that repeated attention for channels cooperating with e-services leads to a great number of new ideas, not only for the service which is designed, but ideas that cover the whole service delivery. This confirms design theory (Cross, 1994) that when only one element (channel) of the service delivery is redesigned, it is always important to consider the wider context.
252 R. Sperling et al.
Finally, participants are impressed by what can be achieved in one day, from initiation and competitive context scanning to prototyping. During the debriefings, participants were pleasantly surprised how much of their input is reflected in the prototype, and judge it to be a useful basis for communicating the service concept to others (customers, business partners as well as colleagues) and for testing feasibility, customer perceived value and competitive strength of the concept.
6 Discussion
This section discusses limitations and contributions of the research. There are several limitations. First of all, it was tested with only 16 business participants and three different cases. This provides a relatively narrow basis and the results must be interpreted with some care. Secondly, we did not use control group sessions as comparison (preferably with comparable representatives from the same firms and for the same service ideas). Hence, it is impossible to single out self-selection effects, case-dependent disturbances or researcher influences (Hagenaars and Segers, 1980) as possible explanations for the positive effects we found. Thirdly, the ‘technological rules’ we formulated are more the result of theory generation than of rigorous theory testing. Despite the fact that we observed several effects that were in line with expectations, our research design does not enable rigorous hypothesis testing. Fourthly, our research does not verify whether the choices made during the sessions prove to be sensible in the next development steps (user tests, competitive analysis, feasibility assessment).
Regarding design task and design approach effectiveness, several findings are interesting. Firstly, it turns out that the multi-channel and technical integration tasks overlap in contributions. Multi-channel discussions contribute to technical integration and vice versa. Intuitively, this is plausible due to the interdependencies between processes and IT: supporting customer tasks nowadays often requires multi-channel cooperation (Wilson, 2004; Smits, 2006; Schueler, 2003) and it requires information processing and technical integration. To our knowledge, the underlying research is the first empirical academic study confirming this overlap. In terms of practical implications, it is disconcerting that experts on technical integration are rarely aware of multi-channel customer preferences and vice versa (Simons and Bouwman, 2006; Kim, 2006). Our findings show that these aspects are closely connected, and that the challenges as well as solutions must be discussed together. We hope that our findings help promote cooperation between both disciplines in creating optimal customer process support.
This leads to a second observation. It regards the use of a multi-disciplinary design team. In the concurrent engineering tradition (Clausing, 1994), multi-disciplinary teams are advised for complex, cross-departmental design challenges. Our research confirms the prudence of this approach for multi-channel services. A third finding is that different facilitators can facilitate the sessions. During the tests three different facilitators facilitated the sessions. We found no indications that the facilitator has (significant) influence on the session. Also it has been shown that the session formats are transferable in a reasonable time between different facilitators. Fourthly, we found that personas, making goals and priorities of the target segment explicit, were mostly useful in an implicit way. They aid in focusing the design effort: “For whose goals are we working?” And they aid as a reference point: “It would better fit Bob’s purposes to choose solution B”. But several participants felt personas to be slightly incongruent to the other
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 253
design tasks which were more functional in nature. Fifthly, we found that translating a list of functions, via functional hierarchy analysis, and task analysis to storyboards in the form of web pages with a navigation structure, is highly appreciated by participants as a way to make a service concept specific and to cross the gap between service concept and design (Cooper and Reimann, 2003). Finally, participants explicitly appreciate the combination of both sessions in one day. Marketing and technology, strategy and operations, customer- and business priorities: they are all addressed in coherence. Participants feel that through a logical sequence of choices outputs are created that are supported across disciplines and are based on a sensible balance between business priorities, technical and organisational feasibility and customer preferences.
7 Conclusion
QFD has been described as a design method that incorporates the voice of the customer (Mazur, 1993; Akao, 1997; Herzwurm et al., 2002). Our multi-channel service design method could be paraphrased as incorporating the voice of the “business-and-technology team”. We created a design approach suitable for a collective design effort of engineers and marketing people. Moreover, design projects tend to consume more time than marketing, sales and service professionals are willing to invest (Stern et al., 1996). Hence we created an approach that can be completed in one day and still generates a very concise prototype of the service, together with a marketing underpinning of the choices made.
From a design point of view, it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of a newly developed artifact, in this instance: the development session (Alter, 1999). Hence, we made the criteria for evaluation explicit, as well as the expected performance of design tasks in relation to these criteria (Verschuren and Hartog, 2005). The design tasks were standardised, a multi-method evaluation approach was developed and a field experiment with business participants from three cases was used to evaluate design tasks effects.
Following this structure, this paper addresses three research questions. Firstly, what are the requirements for the development phase session, based on feedback from business participants with previous MuCh-QFD (initiation session) experience? Secondly, what are design tasks for the development phase session to fulfill the requirements? And thirdly, do those tasks perform as expected? In answer to the first question, participant interests were translated into the following requirements: customer orientation, multi-channel coherence and synergies, concept communication, detailed service specification and technical integration. The answer to the second question (which design tasks?) is the session agenda as described in Table 2. Regarding the third research question (was performance according to expectation?) our findings indicate that most design tasks performed as expected. The exception was the personas task. There, we found unexpected effects. On an explicit level, participants evaluated this activity as being of limited use, and several participants thought that is did not match well with the other activities. But on a more implicit level, we found that it provided the teams with a customer centric reference point, which was useful.
On a more overall level, our field experiment confirmed the importance of incorporating various stakeholders when designing multi-channel services. Next, the prototype plus marketing underpinning were judged a useful basis for on the one hand the
254 R. Sperling et al.
next design steps like user testing and competitive analysis and on the other hand communication with colleagues and business partners. These findings confirm the importance of making service designs visible (Grönroos, 2000), and that this helps crossing the gap between the specification of a service design and the real design. Based on the visual storyboard (task VIII) it was shown to be easier and more precise to discuss multi-channel, technology and process issues, because the issues had been made more tangible.
Overall, the findings confirm that the new method adds value by the combination of speed, customer orientation, integrating engineering, business and customer perspectives, and by visualising multi-channel and technical issues in an e-service prototype, which makes multi-channel service design choices more tangible and precise.
Acknowledgement
An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 8th World Congress on the Management of Electronic Business, held July 11–13, 2007, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
References Akao, Y. (1997) ‘QFD: ‘Past, Present, and Future’’, International Symposium on QFD ‘97,
Linköping. Aken, J.E.v. (2005) ‘Management research as design science: articulating the research products of
mode 2 knowledge production in management’, British Journal of Management, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp.19–36.
Alter, S. (1999) Information Systems; A Management Perspective, 3rd ed., Addison-Wesley, New York.
Clausing, D.P. (1994) Total Quality Development: A Step-by-Step Guide to World-Class Concurrent Engineering, ASME Press, New York.
Cohen, L. (1995) Quality Function Deployment: How to Make QFD Work for You, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
Cooper, A. and Reimann, R. (2003) About Face 2.0 – The Essentials of Interaction Design, Wiley, Indianapolis.
Cross, N. (1994) Engineering Design Methods; Strategies for Product Design, 2nd ed., John Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
Faber, E., Ballon, P., Bouwman, H., Haaker, T., Rietkerk, O. and Steen, M. (2003) ‘Designing business models for mobile ICT services’, Paper presented at 16th Bled Electronic Commerce Conference, Bled, Slovenia.
Gordijn, J. (2002) Value-based Requirements Engineering; Exploring Innovative eCommerce Ideas, Faculty of Exact Sciences, Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit, p.292.
Grönroos, C. (2000) Service Management and Marketing: A Customer Relationship Management Approach, 2nd ed., John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Hagenaars, J.A.P. and Segers, J.H.G. (Eds.) (1980) ‘Onderzoeksontwerp (Research Design)’, Sociologische Onderzoeksmethoden. Deel II; Technieken van Causale Analyse (Sociological Research Methods, Volume II: Techniques of Causal Analysis), Assen, Van Gorcum, p.369.
Herzwurm, G., Schockert, S., Dowie, U. and Breidung, M. (2002) ‘Requirements engineering for mobile-commerce applications’, Presented at Second International M-Commerce Conference, Athens, Greece.
Multi-channel service concept definition and prototyping 255
Hevner, A.R., March, S.T., Park, J. and Ram, S. (2004) ‘Design science in information systems research’, MISQ, Vol. 28, No. 1, pp.75–105.
Hull, E., Jackson, K. and Dick, J. (2002) Requirements Engineering; A Structured Project Information Approach, Springer-Verlag, London.
ISO 13407 (1999) Human-Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems, International Organization for Standardization, Geneva.
Kim, P. (2006) ‘Reinventing the marketing organization’, Forrester Research, pp.1–12. Latzer, M. and Schmitz, S.W. (2004) ‘B2C e-commerce: a frictionless market is not in
sight – arguments, empirics and policy implications’, in Preissl, B., Bouwman, H. and Steinfield, C. (Eds.): E-Life After the Dot Com Bust, Physica-Verlag, Heidelberg, pp.39–61.
Mazur, G.H. (1993) ‘QFD for service industries; from voice of customer to task deployment’, Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Quality Function Deployment, Novi, Michigan, pp.1–10.
Mizuno, S. and Akao, Y.E. (1994) QFD: The Customer-Driven Approach to Quality Planning and Deployment, Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo.
Ramaswamy, R. (1996) Design and Management of Service Processes, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
Schueler, R. (2003) Channel Preferences Onderzoek, Amsterdam, Interview-NSS. Shostack, L.G. (1984) ‘Designing services that deliver’, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 62, No. 1,
pp.133–139. Simons, L.P.A. (2006) Multi-Channel Services for Click and Mortars; Development of a Design
Method, PhD Thesis, Delft University of Technology, Delft. Simons, L.P.A. and Bouwman, H. (2005) ‘Multi-channel service design process: challenges and
solutions’, International Journal of Electronic Business, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp.50–67. Simons, L.P.A. and Bouwman, H. (2006) ‘Extended QFD: multi-channel service concept design’,
Total Quality Management and Business Excellence, Vol. 17, No. 8, pp.1043–1062. Smits, G.J. (2006) Beter Multi-Channelen, JungleRating, Accessed April, http://www.
junglerating.nl/?actueel/nieuws/view/120 Stern, L.W., El-Ansary, A.I. and Coughlan, A.T. (1996) Marketing Channels, Prentice-Hall,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Verschuren, P. and Hartog, R. (2005) ‘Evaluation in design-oriented research’, Quality and
Quantity, Vol. 39, pp.733–762. Wilson, C.P. (2004) ‘The US consumer 2004: multichannel and in-store technology’, Forrester
Research, pp.1–10.
