DIGITAL CUSTOMER SERVICE TRENDS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Customer service is an essential part of many companies and their product and service portfolio. In the current times, customer service has shifted more towards its digital forms. In previous research four digital customer service trends have been identified: virtual assistants, customer service personalization, mobile technologies, and opinion mining. This article aims to compare these findings with reality by employing a focus group discussion with professionals and point out the opportunities and challenges that the companies implementing these trends are faced with. The results show that the findings correspond with academic literature.

Marketing Strategy of the Uber Company in the Global Taxi Service Aggregator Market

The article focuses on the consideration of the marketing strategy of the Uber company. A strategy is essential when a company enters new markets. It is a difficult task for any business and requires managers to understand the specifics of the formation, management of marketing strategies in both local and global markets. The above factors determine the relevance of the research topic. In connection with the processes of globalization and significant modifications in the technological support of business, activities in modern markets are changing significantly. The purpose of this article is to analyse the implementation of the marketing strategy of Uber in the global market to indicate the characteristics and directions of development. In research, the following methods applied: a comparative, analysis and methodology for developing marketing strategies. The American service Uber is striving to gain leadership positions in the development of the Russian market. This drive drives offensive strategies that combine direct competition for low prices and strategies that increase resources and customers by engaging an audience that competitors have missed. As the analysis of the company’s activities showed, Uber implements a specific marketing strategy as an offensive strategy. As part of the confrontation with the main competitors, Uber actively invests in the promotion and advertising of the service, pays attention to pricing policy to provide opportunities for participation in price competition. The American service Uber is striving to gain leadership positions in the development of the Russian market. This commitment drives offensive strategies that combine direct competition for low prices and plans that increase resources and customer base by engaging an audience that competitors have missed. As a result of the analysis of the market of services-aggregators of taxi services, we can conclude that competition is intensifying both from the main competitors, Gett and Yandex.Taxi, and from indirect competitors. Hence, launching a third-party service will be a reactive strategy for Uber, as chief competitors have already diversified their service portfolio. Thus, the marketing strategy in modern conditions of development is an efficient mean for promoting a company in the international market.

Partial Completion as a Nonprofit Strategy

Problem definition: Faced with the challenge of serving beneficiaries with heterogeneous needs and under budget constraints, some nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have adopted an innovative solution: providing partially complete products or services to beneficiaries. We seek to understand what drives an NPO’s choice of partial completion as a design strategy and how it interacts with the level of variety offered in the NPO’s product or service portfolio. Academic/practical relevance: Although partial product or service provision has been observed in the nonprofit operations, there is limited understanding of when it is an appropriate strategy—a void that we seek to fill in this paper. Methodology: We synthesize the practices of two NPOs operating in different contexts to develop a stylized analytical model to study an NPO’s product/service completion and variety choices. Results: We identify when and to what extent partial completion is optimal for an NPO. We also characterize a budget allocation structure for an NPO between product/service variety and completion. Our analysis sheds light on how beneficiary characteristics (e.g., heterogeneity of their needs, capability to self-complete) and NPO objectives (e.g., total-benefit maximization versus fairness) affect the optimal levels of variety and completion. Managerial implications: We provide three key observations. (1) Partial completion is not a compromise solution to budget limitations but can be an optimal strategy for NPOs under a wide range of circumstances, even in the presence of ample resources. (2) Partial provision is particularly valuable when beneficiary needs are highly heterogeneous, or beneficiaries have high self-completion capabilities. A higher self-completion capability generally implies a lower optimal completion level; however, it may lead to either a higher or a lower optimal variety level. (3) Although providing incomplete products may appear to burden beneficiaries, a lower completion level can be optimal when fairness is factored into an NPO’s objective or when beneficiary capabilities are more heterogeneous.

Description and Demo of the Best Practice Caregiving Database on 44 Research Proven Dementia Caregiving Programs

A major advance in family caregiving has been the development, testing, and community delivery of research-proven, evidence-based support programs for family or friend caregivers of persons living with dementia. This presentation showcases and demos Best Practice Caregiving (BPC), a new online resource with comprehensive profiles for 44 of the top evidence-based dementia caregiving programs that are ready for scaling in communities. For these 44 programs, BPC is a database that presents key research findings with links to all its published articles, comprehensive program descriptions including all implementation features, and survey data on program delivery experiences from 324 healthcare and community organizations that offered the program as a regular part of their service portfolio 2019. BPC enables professionals to make side-by-side comparisons of the 44 programs, with the goal of increasing implementations of these evidence-based programs by healthcare and community service organizations.

Creating customer value from data: foundations and archetypes of analytics-based services

The digital transformation offers new opportunities for organizations to expand their existing service portfolio in order to achieve competitive advantages. A popular way to create new customer value is the offer of analytics-based services (ABS)—services that apply analytical methods to data to empower customers to make better decisions and to solve complex problems. However, research still lacks to provide a profound conceptualization of this novel service type. Similarly, actionable insights on how to purposefully establish ABS in the market to enrich the service portfolio remain scarce. We perform a cluster analysis of 105 ABS and triangulate it with a revelatory case study to identify four generic ABS archetypes and to unveil their specific service objectives and characteristics. We also isolate essential factors that shape decision-making regarding the choice of adequate archetypes and subsequent transitions between them. The detailed characterization of different ABS types contributes to a more profound theorizing process on ABS as well as provides a systematization for strategic opportunities to enrich service portfolios in practice.

Development of products and services in small enterprises: proposition of an artifact to discuss creative logics

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to make available an artifact that helps entrepreneurs and managers to recognize the diversity of creative logics centered on resources that are already available to the organization, presenting it as a tool to support the expansion of the product and service portfolio and as an alternative to Research and Development strategies, which are difficult to implement in the context of small businesses.Design/methodology/approachFollowing the precepts of the Action Design Research (ADR) method, researchers and practitioners (teachers and consultants) collaborated in the development of the artifact. Successive versions of the artifact were tested in the field: in classrooms by the teachers and in small companies by the consultants.FindingsIn addition to the artifact itself, which is available on the Internet, the lessons learned from the design process of the artifact were formalized in meta-requirements and meta-designs, in accordance with the precepts of the design theory that served as the foundation of ADR. These meta-specifications facilitate the critical analysis and evolution of the proposed artifact, in addition to the conception and proposition of new artifacts for the same class of problem.Practical implicationsThe dialogical nature of the ADR approach, with the development of the artifact through interactive cycles between design and use, based on the practitioners' experience of using it with the final beneficiaries, resulted in a functional artifact that is simple to use by those interested in discussing product and service innovation with small organizations. The artifact in the form of software is available to all at https://tentypescreation.com.Originality/valueFrom business examples and comparisons with widespread creative tactics, such as copy and invention, eight other creative tactics centered on resources available in the organization are explored by the artifact, providing means for practitioners to discuss alternative ways for managers, entrepreneurs, and future entrepreneurs to face the challenge of product and service innovation in small businesses.

Doing Less to Do More? Optimal Service Portfolio of Non-profits That Serve Distressed Individuals

Problem definition: Many nonprofit organizations (NPOs) serve distressed individuals who seek relief from hardships such as domestic abuse or homelessness. These NPOs aim to maximize social impact by allocating their limited amount of resources to various activities. Academic/practical relevance: NPOs that serve distressed individuals face a complex task because their clients are often unable to articulate their specific needs. As a result, NPOs are driven to not only offer a variety of services to fulfill different needs, but also engage in advisory activities to minimize mismatches between services clients receive and their true needs. Methodology: We develop a model to study an NPO’s service portfolio and effort allocation decisions under resource constraint. Clients’ progress from distress to resolution is stochastic and depends on the NPO’s efforts in different stages of the service offering. Results: We show that it is optimal for resource-constrained NPOs to offer fewer services and invest more in advisory activities when different types of clients are not evenly mixed in the population, when delays in achieving resolution can significantly blunt the social impact created, when the loss of impact due to not serving a fraction of clients is low, or when there is a limited amount of earmarked funds. Otherwise, it is optimal for NPOs to diversify their service offerings and invest less in advisory activities. Managerial implications: Many NPOs are drawn to maximize the number of clients they serve by increasing the number of services they offer. However, we show that, depending on the characteristics of clients and services, NPOs might be able to generate higher social impact by prioritizing the speed of resolution rather than focusing on the number of clients who achieve resolution. We also present a practical application of our model in the context of domestic abuse.

CUSTOMER NEEDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF BUSINESS MODELS FOCUSED ON SERVITIZATION (INDUSTRY 4.0)

Digitalization and the large amounts of information currently handled in the industry are increasing the complexity of servitization, specifically since the outset of Industry 4.0. In this sense, the objective of this study is to identify the needs and key factors of the clients of the study of origin of a leading company in the machine tool sector in the field of Industry 4.0, by conducting semi-structured surveys of different management profiles in leading companies in the automotive sector. The results obtained show eight new concepts grouped together with their respective key value factors that can serve to develop business models adapted to Industry 4.0 in the machine tool sector. A deeper analysis has made it possible to define the measurement of parameters/work systems and the service portfolio as the most outstanding concepts of this research, due to the improvement that contributes to reducing machine downtime and increasing productivity. Finally, it can be concluded that the scientific development of both concepts is an active field in the academic community, however, new concepts are included that open up new fields of research. Key Words: Servitization, Digitalization, Industry 4.0, Customer Needs, Machine tool