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

Abstract

This article describes a multiloop design approach, demonstrating two concatenated build-and-evaluateloops of a project that aims at enhancing and improving tele-counseling at travel agency call-centers. Thesocio-technical system design intends to implement and support a collaborative travel counseling conceptwhich equalizes travel agents and customers within a value co-created service encounter to resolve thespecific 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) createadvisory experience. While the first build-and-evaluate loop mainly enhanced the workplace picture, thesecond build-and-evaluate loop primarily revealed organizational demands. This indicates that the proposeddesign approach enables sequentially broadening the problem space for design and supports iterativelymoving forward the utility of the emerging artifact. Design is informed by concatenating insights from theprevious loops which enrich understanding of the instrumental goals. The presented goals as well as thedesign approach are encouraging candidates for additional testing as a base for general design principles.