From telesales to tele-advisory in travel agencies: Business problems, generic design goals and requirements

  • Authors:
  • Susanne Schmidt-Rauch;Gerhard Schwabe

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Zurich, Switzerland;University of Zurich, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This article describes a multiloop design approach, demonstrating two concatenated build-and-evaluate loops of a project that aims at enhancing and improving tele-counseling at travel agency call-centers. The socio-technical system design intends to implement and support a collaborative travel counseling concept which equalizes travel agents and customers within a value co-created service encounter to resolve the specific problems in travel agency call-centers. The design is finally guided by four instrumental goals: (1) increase transparency, (2) improve information quality, (3) support joint problem solving, and (4) create advisory experience. While the first build-and-evaluate loop mainly enhanced the workplace picture, the second build-and-evaluate loop primarily revealed organizational demands. This indicates that the proposed design approach enables sequentially broadening the problem space for design and supports iteratively moving forward the utility of the emerging artifact. Design is informed by concatenating insights from the previous loops which enrich understanding of the instrumental goals. The presented goals as well as the design approach are encouraging candidates for additional testing as a base for general design principles.