Digital Marketplaces Unleashed

by Claudia Linnhoff-Popien

  Despite all these measures, altering consumer behaviour continues to require time and patience is called for until online searches for service appointments become the normal behaviour of St. Gallen’s average consumer, always bearing in mind the amount of time that has been needed to make electronic banking a service accepted by about 50% of the population in Switzerland.

  10.2.5 Response Time and Efficient End‐to‐End Processes

  Given the described lack of digitisation and need for assistance from our customer support, it came as no great surprise that we occasionally encountered very long response times for requests or comments from both consumers and providers.

  When we first launched the platform, we pushed all sorts of notifications via e‐mail (e. g. appointment booked, request for a specific date or request without dates to send suggestions) to the providers. This meant that they had to check their e‐mail on a regular basis in order to answer consumer requests within an adequate time frame. This worked very well for about half of the providers; however, unfortunately, the other half checked their e‐mail less than once a day, which meant we had to find other solutions to ensure successful appointment coordination via the digital marketplace without impatient consumers making an additional phone call. We also discovered that the consumers’ response time to e‐mail notifications, e. g. rescheduling or available date suggestions, often also left a lot to be desired. These delays can be quite troublesome for the other party and result in complications, such as double bookings if another consumer requests a specific date, via Amiona or phone, which has already been suggested to someone else.

  We therefore decided to opt for a more direct channel at the end of the first year and started pushing notifications to users via SMS. This required us to make entering the mobile phone number mandatory when requesting a service (previously only the name and e‐mail were mandatory). We also made it a mandatory field for new providers to complete and added SMS numbers for the existing registered providers. The SMS message lists the most important information, i. e. what was requested by whom, what has been agreed or must be done next, and also includes a tiny URL that takes the user to the appointment view for the request (without login), where they can accept, reschedule or reject it, and add any comments where applicable. The addition of SMS notifications turned out to be an enormous improvement. Some providers now confirm requests within a minute and the consumers’ response time using their mobile phones has also greatly improved.

  However, you never stop learning and we noticed that the requests to certain providers were still remaining unanswered for a long time. It turned out that these businesses (most of them with three or more employees) had strict “no phones at work” policies and did not want to have even a single phone lying around as they were worried it might cause too much of a distraction. Based on the coloured LED signals on smartphones, we therefore came up with the idea of a simple button on the main desk displaying new requests, new comments and “everything OK” in three different colours: blue means new message, red means action required and green means OK. The button only requires a USB connection to the main computer and also offers an additional feature: When it is pushed, it launches the browser, goes to Amiona.​ch, logs into the user’s account and opens the messages view. The button therefore offers another convenient option to make users aware of new requests with a quick and easy response solution. This additional notification channel allowed us to resolve complications with businesses that did not want to receive any SMS notifications.

  10.3 Lessons Learned

  While the digital appointment coordination and functions of the platform were based on our scientific research (cf [1–3]). , we also learned some anticipated and less anticipated lessons when the platform went “live” and we were presented with the users’ actual behaviour.

  The findings led to many improvements, which were already implemented during the iterative development process, and also confirmed the potential benefit of a local service marketplace for both consumers and service providers.

  10.3.1 Consumers Use the Option to Coordinate Services Outside Business Hours

  As we assumed that the opportunity to request services outside business hours would offer a great benefit to employed consumers in particular, we were very interested to see how this would actually develop. We did indeed witness a large proportion of requests being submitted during the evening hours or on weekends from the very beginning; however, until now, this has not translated into a large number of repeat requests, as we were unable to ensure adequate response times before the introduction of the SMS notifications, and even less so outside business hours.

  10.3.2 Service Providers Benefit from an Easy‐to‐Use Digital Consumer Channel and Less Interruptions from Phone Calls During Their Daily Business

  While most appointment requests are still submitted by phone, service providers were delighted by the simplification of their workday as a result of the online requests submitted via Amiona. Small business owners in particular, who like most service providers in St. Gallen, do not have an employee dedicated to answering the phone, offered positive feedback with regard to improvements to their processes and, consequently, greater customer satisfaction, as there were less interruptions by phone calls while serving customers. As the owner of a small barber shop put it: “I would appreciate it if all of my customers used Amiona, as it makes my life that much easier. I really enjoy using the platform and it is of great value to me and the customers I serve”. In addition, it helps providers to attract new customers, as the owner of a beauty salon pointed out: “Visitors to my website really like the easy and convenient appointment request service provided by the Amiona button and I was able to gain many new clients through it as well”.

  10.3.3 The Provided Infrastructure Motivates Providers to Offer New Services

  The possibility to easily communicate new services online and handle requests efficiently via Amiona has also motivated local providers to introduce new services. A local bakery, for example, restarted its Sunday morning bread delivery service that had been discontinued a couple of years ago due to the high administrative effort.

  10.3.4 Service Providers Appreciate Local Initiatives

  Many of the service providers that we had addressed prior to and after the launch of the platform immediately saw the benefit of being part of the local marketplace and we were able to convince many of those who were reluctant by highlighting the local approach of the marketplace in St. Gallen. This local approach turned out to be a valuable unique selling proposition in comparison to other appointment coordination service providers and industry‐specific booking platforms. Apparently, many service providers feel responsible for their towns or cities to a certain extent and do not wish to jeopardise local initiatives.

  10.3.5 Local Digital Marketplaces Must Provide the Means to Include Providers Who Only Have Paper‐Based Agendas

  Whereas digitisation is the general trend being implemented on a large scale in the financial or manufacturing industries, we learned that it is quite the opposite in the case of smaller‐scale service providers. This offered us the opportunity to step in and provide easy‐to‐understand, structured digital processes; however, often only to a certain limit. As described above, Amiona’s functions include direct booking and integration with other calendars via ICS feed; however, as we learned, most smaller‐scale businesses only use paper‐based agendas and are not yet willing to change. This represents a very important issue and the reason why we implemented three different appointment coordination processes. We remain convinced that for now and the foreseeable future, all local digital marketplaces must offer these three options to include the majority of businesses and provide users with an interesting range of services.

  10.3.6 Provider and Consumer R
esponse Time Is the Most Critical Factor in Successful Appointment Coordination

  The support of differently structured processes in appointment coordination to address the differing levels of digitisation, however, did not yet lead to an entirely satisfactory approach. As already described above, inadequate response times resulted in many impatient (and probably irritated) users calling the provider to get a response and it is quite apparent that a digital marketplace has no added value in comparison to a simple online directory if the user still has to call the provider to arrange an appointment. Request‐answer‐based appointment coordination therefore has to be accompanied by different push channels to notify users of new requests or status changes that require their action. This conclusion and the complications, in the form of double‐ and overbookings that result from missing and delayed consumer responses (e. g. when another consumer requests a specific date that has been suggested to a non‐responsive consumer), quickly made improving response time our main priority.

  Fortunately, the introduction of SMS notifications and the desk button massively improved the user experience and increased the satisfaction ratings of both consumers and providers. This was confirmed both by the feedback we received and the subsequent increase in transactions among returning users.

  As new requests are still overlooked from time to time, we still track transactions in our quality management system and use phone calls as a last resort to notify users of unanswered messages after a specified time frame. Fortunately, this is required far less often than in the beginning when we only operated with e‐mail notifications and is therefore further proof of the success of the measures we have since introduced to improve response time.

  10.4 Exploitation and Outlook

  The feedback we received from providers and consumers in both St. Gallen and other regions was very positive and resulted in a number of social services organisations, real estate companies and larger‐scale employers expressing an interest in marketplaces for citizens, tenants and employees. We therefore pushed development further to offer a ready‐to‐use and easily adaptable standard software solution for local service marketplaces. This solution has since been implemented in various forms, such as a local marketplace for professional and informal services in Weil der Stadt, a platform for neighbourly help in Hamburg, or a platform for the residents of an independent living facility in eastern Switzerland. The concept of coordinating local services has now also been adapted by the major IT corporations. It is therefore vital that future implementations and software developments focus on very specific scopes and usage scenarios.

  The lessons learned, insights gained and user feedback received generated many new ideas for technical improvements and development, of which not all could be implemented immediately.

  Certain users expressed the wish to have a first come first served policy for requests to multiple personally selected providers. This would be beneficial among others to caregivers in retirement homes, e. g. when they need to organise social driving services on a specific date for one of their residents. In such cases they could send the request to all of the collaborating driving services and the first to answer would get the order as the request would be closed to the others. Similar requirements were also requested by people in need of time‐critical appointments, e. g. with a doctor. Such users would also greatly benefit from the first come first serve policy for their requests, as they would no longer have to make a dozen phone calls to schedule a single appointment.

  In order to access more external providers and continue to improve response times, we are additionally considering the use of automated phone call systems as an easy‐to‐use and very “pushy” request‐notification channel. The integration of existing vertical direct booking platforms, e. g. for cleaning services, might also be an option in the near future. The expansion of the service portfolio and directly bookable dates would be similar to what has already happened on hotel reservation and flight booking platforms. Finally, we hope to extend the coordination processes in the not too distant future to facilitate “naturally speaking” requests through text mining and artificial intelligence to enhance the consumer experience, including with adjusted services for the handicapped.

  References

  1.

  P. Osl, Dienstleistungen für Independent Living: Kundenanforderungen, Potenzialbewertung und Handlungsempfehlungen, Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2010.

  2.

  E. Sassen, Elektronische Dienstvermittlung für Independent Living: Geschäftsmodelle und Gestaltungsempfehlungen, St. Gallen, 2012.

  3.

  P. Schenkel, Elektronische Dienstleistungsmarktplätze – Prozessmodell, IT-Architektur und Demonstration, St. Gallen, 2015.

  Footnotes

  1To discover the platform visit sg.​amiona.​ch.

  © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany 2018

  Claudia Linnhoff-Popien, Ralf Schneider and Michael Zaddach (eds.)Digital Marketplaces Unleashedhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49275-8_11

  11. How Large Corporations Survive Digitalization

  Robert Jacobi1 and Ellena Brenner1

  (1)The Nunatak Group GmbH, Munich, Germany

  Robert Jacobi (Corresponding author)

  Email: robert.jacobi@nunatak.com

  Ellena Brenner

  Email: ellena.brenner@nunatak.com

  11.1 Large Corporations in the Context of Digital Transformation

  The extent to which the digital transformation disrupts large corporations is unprecedented. Technological advances make product life cycles shorter. Consumers expect increasingly personalized services. Hardware becomes a commodity, and it is the seamless user experience that creates value and revenue. Chances actually are that not winning the race implies not surviving at all [1].

  Since the turn of the century, over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list have been replaced by faster‐growing peers. Alongside industry‐specific reasons, such as low oil prices in recent years, digital transformation is the main cause. Not only players from traditional industries are affected. Companies that were considered cutting‐edge innovators some ten or fifteen years ago have not been able to keep up with technological change. Take Finnish handheld‐maker Nokia, which stopped continuously reinventing itself at some point and was taken over by Microsoft as a consequence. The same is true for Blackberry Ltd.: Its revenues plummeted from 19.9 billion USD in 2011 to 2.2 billion USD in 2016, while the market for smartphones exploded worldwide.

  So, who are the newcomers? They are companies such as Netflix, which started with delivering DVDs to doorsteps in a subscription model in the U.S. in 1997. It is now the world’s largest online video‐on‐demand service with 86 million subscribers [2]. Salesforce, the cloud computing company that was founded in 1999 and employs some 19,000 people, is another example. The company that was leading the pack of Fortune 500 newcomers in 2016 is PayPal, the payment service built by the digital disruptors Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, among others. After the spin‐off from Ebay, it is independent yet again, offering free peer‐to‐peer payment services while collecting revenue from big merchants.

  It is not even necessary to reinvent the wheel in order to run a successful business in a digital world. Across developed economies, home‐order services stopped printing their catalogs and went out of business. At the same time, online retailers such as Amazon or Zalando, the Germany‐based fashion powerhouse, watched their turnover skyrocket. Not because they invented a new business model, but because they anticipated technological developments and changing customer expectations. This was made possible by constantly evolving internal structures and by strong beliefs centered around innovation, speed and agility – as well as a focus on building up a great product and a loyal customer base first, then thinking about profitability.

  So what about the Citibanks, Comcasts and
Chryslers of the world? Is there a chance for them to survive digital transformation against dynamic, well‐financed newcomers that attract the best management and engineering talent in the world? Or will all of them succumb to the innovator’s dilemma, which states that incumbents doing everything right in their present environment might still lose out to new market entrants who manage to anticipate future customer needs? Yes, there is a chance, and the older giants must find the courage for open‐heart surgery in order to keep our economic system balanced and prosperous. Let’s look at some strategies for survival and how to implement them in a large, bureaucratic organization.

  11.2 Key Dimensions for Successful Organizational Change

  Corporate managers have access to an extensive body of literature on organizational change, with theories and approaches that are sometimes useful, but often too academic by nature [3]. Many change process models have been developed in the tradition of Kurt Lewin’s work [4]. Lewin’s three‐step model for social change, from unfreeze to move to refreeze was developed back in the 1940’s and much quoted ever since. It assumes that driving forces must always outweigh resisting forces if change is to happen [5]. The change process aims to introduce temporary instability and is driven from the top [4].