WEEK 5 |
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Synopsis We consider the attributes that make up the portfolio of items in the “service-product,” or online experience, delivered by an e-Service. We also consider how to begin to understand the attributes, and their relationship to business objectives. Readings These first readings attempt to get at the question of "What is an electronic service-product?" and "What is the experience that we're trying to deliver?" Classic service management texts state that service products consist of "goods, services, and information". Many e-commerce commentators have talked about e-services relating to "content, commerce, and community". These may seem to be simple and obvious concepts -- in fact they are seldom explained or examined in greater depth by researchers -- but in the real world are quite complex in what they are made up of. Furthermore, they seem to be continually evolving, as indicated by the third article below. While they were a little simpler when e-Service content was just HTML, taking into account the ideas coming from the Section 4 readings complicates the definition of "service-product" even more. (R) Rust, R. T., and R. W. Oliver, “The Real-Time Service Product: Conquering Customer Time and Space (Chapter 3),” in New Service Development, J. A. Fitzsimmons and M. Fitzsimmons (eds.), Sage Publications, 2000. Note: Handed out in class. Please contact me if you did not get one, so we can arrange for delivery. Questions to Consider: How can a service-product be static? How can a service product be dynamic? How are the "static" and "dynamic" issues related to "real-time" service-products? (R) Kotha, S., “A Note on Virtual Communities” http://us.badm.washington.edu/kotha/internet/handouts/vc5.PDF Questions to Consider: What is the content provided by communities? (R) Schwartz, M., “The Care and Keeping of Online Customers,” Computerworld, January 8, 2001 http://www.computerworld.com/cwi/story/0,1199,NAV47_STO55917,00.html Questions to Consider: e-Services were initially motivated as a great cost-saving tool -- a way to cut call-center and person-to-person interaction costs. Why now are service-products being expanded in the ways mentioned here? The next articles consider how one might come to understand the characteristics and effectiveness of content actually used. As the "front-office" of the service, the customer interface's content in an e-Service represents the business activities businesses hope to carry out. That is, the business model is translated into different forms of "goods, services, and digital content" available or stated to be available through the service. Extending this idea to activities of customers -- the consumption of content from the service product might lead us to identify the needs and objectives of customers that visit the site. These first two articles consider basic ideas of how to re-configure customer activities with "content" within the "service-product" into information that managers can use to understand the service-product. I really like the 1999 article ... if you have extra time, you might read the follow-up for more basic ideas on "data-mining" within e-Services, which essentially requires data collection, rearrangement, and statistical analysis about the "service-product". (R) Greening, D., “Data Mining on the Web: There’s Gold in that Mountain of Data,” WebTechniques, January 2000. http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2000/01/greening/ (R) Greening, D., “Tracking Users: What Marketers Really Want to Know,” WebTechniques, July 1999. http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/1999/07/greening/ These second two articles are more "academic", in that they try to identify "types" of electronic services, specifically within e-Retailing (I like to think of it as "small-sample, strategic-issue data mining"). Many articles talk about conceptual "e-Business Models" as pure strategies one might implement on the WWW, but in practice, most e-retailers mix-and-match as they see fit. Thus, one might take the position that you can only identify the real strategic position of an e-Service relative to its competitors through what it is really doing -- which is represented by its "service-product." Both articles approach the e-Service's "service-product" from the perspective that the service-product can be represented as a "configuration" of service attributes. The objective of the first (Heim and Sinha) is to understand (i) how to use data about the "service-product" to position services to understand their product strategy, and (ii) to analyze the relationship between this competitive position and the level of service quality perceived by customers. Some of the middle part gets pretty technical, so if you don't like reading about statistical methodology, skip Section 3 (but still examine the variables in the Tables in Section 3 -- they relate to digital content). The objective of the second article (Spiller and Lohse) -- which you can omit without great loss if you find you don't have the time -- was largely to do competitive positioning. It should provide some other ideas about the "content" within e-retailing, and a different empirical approach to empirically discovering "types" of e-Service service-product strategies. (R) Heim, G. R., and K. K. Sinha, “Service-Product Configurations in Electronic Retailing,” Working Paper, June 2000. servprodconfigs.rtf servprodconfigs.pdf Questions to Consider: What are the benefits and shortcomings of studying e-Services solely based on their "service-product" attributes? Is it feasible to perform such research for actual competitive analysis? (R) Spiller, P., and G. Lohse, “A Classification of Internet Retail Stores,” International Journal of Electronic Commerce,2, 2, 1998. Note: Handed out in class. Please contact me if you did not get one, so we can arrange for delivery of the article to you. acoirstores.pdf Related Readings (Not Required) Greenspun, P., "Envisioning a site that won't be featured in suck.com," Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/suck Greenspun, P., "So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs," Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/money Greenspun, P., "Scalable systems for on-line communities," Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing http://www.arsdigita.com/books/panda/community "How Affiliate Programs Work" http://www.howstuffworks.com/affiliate-program.htm Urban, G., Sultan, F., and W. J. Qualls, “Placing Trust at the Center of Your Internet Strategy,” Sloan Management Review, Fall 2000, p. 39-48. Assignment 1. Attempt to construct a list of all of the types of attributes (goods, services, information/digital content) companies might include in an e-Service’s service-product. 2. [Apply the framework in the Heim and Sinha paper.] Visit the websites of the following companies: www.raisinrack.com, www.baltcoffee.com, www.travelocity.com, www.gemm.com, and www.autoweb.com and classify their e-products in one of the four categories of the e-product taxonomy: Niche Market, Market Extender, Dynamic Mass Market, and Customized Mega Market. Submit a 1-2 page write-up justifying the rationale for your classification. |