Designing touchpoints for business to consumer services -particular emphasis on designable touchpoints

Abstract

Service companies have been paying attention to touchpoint management with utmost importance. It is because the corporations understand that they meet their customers directly through “touchpoints.” Hence, several scholars advocate a coherent view across multiple touchpoints in a service journey under the concept of “touchpoint orchestration” (Gloppen, 2009; Goncalves & Saco, 2009). However, there is little knowledge available regarding how to orchestrate those multiple touchpoints.

The prime goal of this research is establishing how to orchestrate touchpoints in services at a concrete and practical level. In order to do that, a service typology appropriate for managing touchpoints is a prerequisite. Further, identifying the key factors for managing touchpoints and how the key factors influence on designing and managing touchpoints should be scrutinized.

As many previous literature claim, touchpoint orchestration requires the collaboration across multiple design disciplines. Therefore, the notion of designable touchpoints (DTs) is identified and classified into DTs by space design, DTs by identity design, DTs by advertising and graphic design, DTs by product design, and DTs by new media design identified for the sake of concrete design management.

Through literature review, expert interviews and FGD, expert survey, user workshops, and user FGIs, the five key factors for designing and managing DTs were identified. The factors are (1) dependence on DTS; (2) interaction with DTs; (3) intangibility; (4) duration of service delivery, discrete or continuous; and (5) service user motive, utilitarian or hedonic.

For the service typology for DT orchestration, 13 representative business to consumer (B2C) services were selected from Korea Standard Industry Classification. By evaluating the status of the identified five key factors for 13 services through a survey, seven service types were emerged except urban railway. 13 times of user workshops were conducted to...