PLUGGING INTO THE

INFORMATION AGE
MARKETING CHANNELS
AND SCM

Prof. ERNESTO B. ARPON, DBA, CPME

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 Let us Pray!
Father in heaven, we thank you for
today’s opportunity to learn and grow.
Together we lift to you our meeting,
our activities, our lessons and all our
fellow learners in spite of our
challenging situation amidst Covid 19.
May your spirit guide us and bless us.
This we pray in Jesus name.
Amen!

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 Objectives
1. To explore the services economy and the
information age
2. To show how services marketers can use
information technology as an employee tool for
improving customer service and increasing
productivity
3. To demonstrate how services marketers can enlist
information technology to empower their customers
4. To explain how information technology can help
bridge the physical distance between organization
and customer and enable the interactive experience

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 Objectives (cont’d)
5. To illustrate the various ways in which services
marketers can employ information technology to
learn more about their customers and respond to
them more effectively
6. To caution service organizations regarding the
negative impact of technology
7. To convey the many challenges of using
technology to manage customer interfaces in
service industries

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 Outline
I. Introduction
II. Services and the Information Age
III. Enabling the Interactive Experience
IV. Curating Customer Information
V. Coping with Negative Impacts of Services
Technology
VI. Challenges of Using Technology to Manage
Customer Interfaces
VII. Summary and Conclusion

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 Services and the
Information Age

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 Services and the
Information Age (cont’d)
• Technology in the Core Service (Main Offering)

• Technology as a Supplementary Service Support

Tool

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 Enabling the Interactive
Experience

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 Empowering Employees
Through Technology
• Technology Devices
• Networking

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 Empowering the Customer
• Self-service machines, such as vending or
automated teller machines (ATMs)
• Computerized service delivery systems
• Intelligent agents
• Service robots

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 Curating Customer Information
• Advances in information technology have
allowed organizations to collect large
quantities of information about customers and
to create and deliver customer services
hitherto unimaginable.
• It has also become possible to move from
mass marketing to targeting individuals.

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 Curating Customer
Information (cont’d)
• Customer databases require several steps:
– Group customers into categories: current customers,
prospective customers, and lapsed customers
– Data on the recency and frequency of each
customer's purchases
– Data on each customer's purchases over a period of
about twelve months
– Data on relevant customer information that will
improve the company's ability to serve customer
needs (preferred sizes, birthdays, credit card
numbers, etc.)

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 Curating Customer
Information (cont’d)
• Uses
– Tracking customers' purchase patterns
– Make purchase patterns easily accessible to the
frontline service provider
• Cautions
– Services marketers need to be very cautious about
privacy issues as they create and use customer
databases

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 Coping with Negative Impacts
of Services Technology
• Technology will continue to play a critical role in
service organizations’ competitive position.
• Service organizations often find that they have
implemented new technology systems only to
discover they have made no provisions for the
absence of the technology during a power
failure.
• Services employment levels may fall in absolute
terms as technology replaces workers or
reduces the need for workers.

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 Challenges of Using Technology
to Manage Customer Interfaces
• Weak links in technological customer interfaces
• Steps for improving the technology of customer
interfaces

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 Weak Links in Customer
Interfaces
• Automated Idiocy
– The rush to automate service functions often leads to
systems that automatically do stupid things.
• Time Sink
– New services technology can steal valuable time from
the technology user.
• Law of the Hammer
– Based on the idea that a small child with a hammer sees
everything as a nail. Technology can be used too much!
– An obsession with too many “bells and whistles”

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 Weak Links in
Customer Interfaces (cont’d)
• Technology Lock
– Technological designs persist long after their functional
value is gone.
• Last Inch
– Many customer interface problems occur at the point
of contact between the customer and the technology.
• Hi-Tech Versus Hi-Touch
– Customers face a confusing set of automated
instructions when they really need to speak to a
human being and not to a machine. Phone mail can
become “phone jail.”

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 Steps for Improving the
Technology of Customer Interfaces
• Provide marketer input into the technology of
customer interface design
– The marketer can help prevent design problems
• Stay customer-focused, not machine-focused
– Essential to successful customer interface design
• Make services technology invisible to the customer
– Place technology in the background
• Insist on flexible design
– Insist on designs that offer employees and customers
maximum flexibility

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 What problems clients encounter
or hate in a bank?

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 https://youtu.be/VtRL6i7XZ0E

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 What problems clients encounter
or hate in a store?

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 https://youtu.be/NrmMk1Myrxc

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 What problems clients encounter
or hate in a restaurant?

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 https://youtu.be/FFCPKmLAZb4

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SUMMARY

- The marketer should be able to identify the possible

irritants and find a way to solve the problem
- The marketer should be able to identify technologies
that can help solve the problem and better provide
value for the customers
- The marketer should make use of technology as its
possible source of competitive advantage over its
competitors in providing a pleasant, memorable
customer experience.

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 Web Sites
• Apple
(http://www.apple.com), p. 34 & 36
• Amazon
(http://www.amazon.com), p. 35
• eBay
(http://www.ebay.com), p. 35
• Google
(http://www.google.com), p. 35
• Facebook
(http://www.facebook.com), p. 35 & 38
• Youtube
(http://www.youtube.com), p. 35
• TED
(http://www.ted.com), p. 35
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 Web Sites (cont’d)
• Wall Street Journal
– Interactive edition
(http://www.wsj.com), p. 37
– Careers resource
(http://www.careerjournal.com), p. 37
• LinkedIn
(http://www.linkedin.com), p. 38
• AT&T
(http://www.att.com), p. 38
• Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency
(http://www.ogilvy.com), p. 38
• HotWired
(http://www.hotwired.com), p. 38

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 Web Sites (cont’d)
• Siebel Systems
(http://www.siebel.com), p. 38
• MySpace
(http://www.myspace.com), p. 38
• Newscorp
(http://www.newscorp.com), p. 38
• Dropbox
(http://www.dropbox.com), p. 39

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 Web Sites (cont’d)
• FedEx
(http://www.fedex.com), p. 40
• American Airlines
(http://www.aa.com), p. 40
• Travelocity
(http://www.travelocity.com), p. 40
• Dell Computers
(http://www.dell.com), p. 41
• Expedia
(http://www.expedia.com), p. 43
• Get Human
(http://www.gethuman.com/us/), p. 43

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