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The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new strategic management tool – the reverse persona. In doing so, the methods, use and benefits documented from a case study with a global franchisee organization are presented.

This tool was derived from working with a global franchisee organization sought to design and launch a new product into the market. The reverse persona was deployed through n=14 qualitative interviews with franchisee owners were conducted to understand their perceptions of customers, awareness and concern of competition and their willingness to take risks. These insights were collated to develop reverse personas for the senior leadership team within the organization.

Changing the scope of personas from external customers to internal employee development, can further strengthen the method’s effectiveness in decision-making and strategic management, particularly for the implementation and roll out of new products.

In the case study, the senior leadership team saw the manager persona as a strategic aid to, “Help target the implementation of new products in stores, select franchise owners for potential new roles and to deeply understand the motivations, challenges and attributes of their middle management contributing to the competitive advantage of the organisation.”

This article is the first to explore the use of personas for internal strategic planning use within a company.

The purpose of this paper is to identify service design strategies to improve outcome-oriented services by enhancing consumers’ emotional experience, while overcoming customer variability.

An abductive, multiple-case study involves 12 service firms from diverse online and offline service sectors.

Overall, six service design strategies represent two overarching themes: customer empowerment can involve design for typical customers, visibility, and community building, while customer accommodation can involve design for personas, invisibility, and relationship building. Using these strategies helps set the stage for a service to offer an emotional experience.

The study offers a first step toward combining investigations of service experience and user experience. Further research can strengthen these links.

The six design strategies described using examples from case research offer managerial recommendations. In particular, these strategies can help service managers address the customer-induced variability inherent in services.

Extant studies of experience staging have focused on particular sectors such as hospitality and leisure; this study contributes by investigating outcome-focused services and identifying strategies to create unique experiences that offset variability. It also represents a rare effort to combine research from service management and interaction design, shedding light on the link between service experience and user experience.

A customer's journey of searching for a product or service, evaluating it, purchasing it, using it, recommending it, rebuying it or rejecting it is unique in itself. Organisations always have dreamt of getting inside the customers' minds and trying to understand what's happening inside at each of these steps. This chapter explains the customer journey concept and the analysis of the various components of the customer journey. We highlight that the firms need to understand the customer journeys and the multiple touchpoints they interact with to create a worthwhile customer experience. The chapter lists out the various touchpoints, including social/external touchpoints, customer-owned touchpoints, partner-owned touchpoints and brand-owned touchpoints. We discuss three frameworks that can be used by a firm to understand design a customer journey. These frameworks include AIDA (awareness, interest, desire and action), MAI (measure, analyse and improve) and journey maps. The chapter recommends the various steps which a firm can use to create a journey map. In the end, we create a linkage between the customer journey and business transformation. The chapter builds a case for the application of customer journey management by pointing out that it is a complex phenomenon, and the firms should use a structured approach to design and manage the customer journey.

Small business capabilities and customer interactions are particularly susceptible to market disruptions. Small businesses must pivot quickly to build or grow their capabilities and manage diverse strategies to deal with crises. This ability to quickly adapt and formulate strategies is necessary to help small businesses maintain sales and continue to engage with their clients, especially in light of disruption and crises. This work uses design thinking strategies to provide insight into how businesses can navigate such disruptions.

This research investigates how design thinking can help small businesses address crises. The focus is on leveraging design thinking strategies such as empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing (EDIPT), divergence/convergence and customer journey mapping design thinking tools.

The authors provide propositions and strategies to help firms adapt their strategies to the demands of clients during crises.

This piece provides an accessible introduction to three design thinking strategies (general EDIPT model, convergence/divergence and consumer journey mapping). The authors present this in the context of disruption, especially the recent pandemic, specifically focusing on small businesses.

Ontela, a technology start-up company, has introduced an innovative service called PicDeck that improves the mobile imaging experience for wireless subscribers. Ontela sells PicDeck to wireless carriers, who in turn private-label the service to their subscribers. Ontela must decide which customer segments it should target for the service and how to create a positioning strategy and a marketing communication plan to promote it. It must also consider the value proposition of the PicDeck service for wireless carriers (its direct customers), who need to be convinced that the service will lead to higher monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) and/or increased subscriber loyalty. Part A of the case provides qualitative information on customer personae that represent different customer segments. Students are asked to develop a targeting and positioning strategy based on this qualitative information. Part B provides quantitative data on customer preferences that can be used to identify response-based customer segments, as well as demographic and media habits information that can be used to profile the segments. Students are asked to revise their recommendations based on the additional quantitative data.

The case reinforces the principles of data-driven customer segmentation, discusses the appropriate criteria for selecting segments, and provides a deeper understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches to identifying and evaluating segments. The case illustrates how the results of data-driven segmentation may run counter to approaches that rely on “gut feel” or qualitative information alone.

Uber had pioneered the growth and delivery of modern ridesharing services by leveraging the explosive growth of technology, GPS navigation, and smartphones. Ridesharing services had expanded across the world, growing rapidly in the United States, China, India, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Even as these services expanded and gained popularity, however, the pickup experience for drivers and riders did not always meet the expectations of either party. Pickups were complicated by traffic congestion, faulty GPS signals, and crowded pickup venues. Flawed pickups resulted in rider dissatisfaction and in lost revenues for drivers. Uber had identified the pickup experience as a top strategic priority, and a team at Uber, led by group product manager Birju Shah, was tasked with designing an automated solution to improve the pickup experience. This involved three steps. First, the team needed to analyze the pickup experience for various rider personas to identify problems at different stages in the pickup process. Next, it needed to create a model for predicting the best rider location for a pickup. The team also needed to develop a quantitative metric that would determine the quality of the pickup experience. These models and metrics would be used as inputs for a machine learning.

A significant management issue for nonprofit organisations (NPOs) is the disconnect between services beneficiaries and the funders of those services. Individual donors and fundraisers provide the resources to enable other people (or animals) to be supported. The purpose of this paper is to address this service management challenge through new types of customer service interactions that bring together service donors and service recipients through innovative digital communication.

Based on a review, and illustrated by recent examples of innovative best practice, the authors develop a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication.

The paper starts by identifying the problem of “nonprofit service disintermediation”. The paper also outlines the inadequacies of popular frameworks of communication, widely taught in business schools, to understand the new reality of customer-service organisation engagement in the digital age. Through adopting a customer engagement lens, the paper develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between customer participation and service brand communication.

Given the authors’ focus on the intersection between new communication opportunities and customer service interactions, this paper adds novel insight to theory and raises important implications for management.

The paper explores how, through these new communication interactions, engagement with, and loyalty to, the brand is built over time in a fluid and dynamic way. It identifies a disintermediated relationship, distinct to other service contexts, but significant in terms of value and social impact.