Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Technology, tools and setting
Introduction
• Equipment and buildings can play a relevant
role in service production
• But this does not contradict the basic
concepts of service management (as the
relevance of personnel)
Physical setting and technical tools
• Influence on:
• ‐ cost containment and rationalisation
• ‐ quality improvement
• ‐ new or better managed links with customers
• ‐ behaviour
• ‐ technology adaption
• In general, technologies may contribute to
rapid changes in the business landscape
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28/11/2013
Information technology
• Once a less relevant factor, this has acquired
dramatic relevance in any business.
• As any technology, IT enhances individual
productivity and allows economies of scale
• It also reinforces the inherent logic of service
economy
• Finally, it allows customers to become less
dependent on suppliers (and the birth of new
companies)
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Cost rationalisation
• Technology can substitute manpower (with
different impacts on the client)
• E.g. security
Impact on quality
• Machines can ensure that things are being
done as they have to
• And they can make it possible to have the
service available 24x7, with also higher quality
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28/11/2013
Links with customers
• Technologies can allow new and strengthened
links with customers
• Boundaries between supplier and customer
tend to dissolve (but don’t dissolve)
Technology and design affecting
behaviour
• If the quality of a service requires a specific
action or interaction, some tools can promote
the desired behaviour
• Club Med and the tables for 8 people
• Legoland and the booking‐queuing
management
• The status and motivation of employees can
also be enhanced
Technology and design affecting
behaviour (cntd.)
• Technology isn’t necessarily hard or complex:
the design of a menu in a restaurant
• Equipment, physical tools, premises can
promote (the expected) client participation
• Same for the Internet home page (and the
whole web site)
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28/11/2013
Technology and design affecting
behaviour (cntd.)
• Another relevant impact is on the HR market
• Technology and design can be enable – or an
obstacle
• Design and aesthetics have an influence of
several kinds of behaviour: physical, social,
intellectual, emotional – and through this, on
the perceived quality
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Internet scenarios (Nordfors‐Levin,
1999)
Dispersed power
The electronic
The Wild West
communities
Community Isolation
Politics take The power of the
command portals
Concentrated power
Internet and the future
• Internet allows a real‐time economy
• It leads to increased interactivity
• It’s weightless and cost‐effective, so it has
become global
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