ServiceFriday: Keeping Customers Happy in a Rapidly Changing Service Industry

The service industry has always been centered around face-to-face encounters between businesses and customers, but with new developments such as AI, robots, and virtual reality, new “spaces” of interaction have been added to the mix. Businesses have to consider digital, physical, and social spaces and until recently, they have been regarding these as fully separate …

ServiceFriday: Digital Twin Technology – Predictions for the Future

Many companies use predictive modeling to forecast future outcomes. However, while modeling cannot completely achieve this goal, digital twins (a dynamic software model of a physical thing or system) present one of today’s most advanced technologies for this purpose. By tapping into the vast data pool that is inevitably created by a digital twin’s interaction …

ServiceFriday: Busy as a Bee – A Look into the Warehouse of the Future

While many online retailers like Amazon nowadays use parallel zoning or conveyer belt-based order-to-man approaches in their warehouses, dubbed Customer Fulfillment Centers, Ocado Plc., a British online supermarket company, has now raised the bar of online grocery shopping by deploying robots to assemble customer orders. The Ocado system, aptly called a hive, has captured the …

ServiceFriday: Robots on the Frontline and the Future of Services

“By 2020, it is estimated that 85 percent of all customer interactions will take place without a human agent”. To improve their customer experience, speed up the process of service recovery and cut costs, services management increasingly starts to rely on automatized solutions, so-called “service robots” to handle the customer interactions. In a recent research …

Talk Amongst Yourselves: The Importance of Widening the Technology Discussion

Companies be warned. People have troubling concerns about emerging technologies that would probably surprise your managers and executives — and these people include employees as well as customers. As a society, the big kitchen-table talk that we need to be having concerns our fears about the ways our role as humans may change in the future. …