Information Systems and Service Design (Fall 2011) UC Berkeley, School of Information

Using technology to transform person-to-person services into self-service ones eliminates the frontline employee and moves back the line of visibility between the front and back stage, giving the customer access to information that was previously visible only to the frontline employee. A more subtle way to understand the impact of introducing technology in a service encounter is that it changes the proportions of physical, interpersonal, and information actions. From this perspective, these proportions are design parameters that can be systematically adjusted by technologies that enable the different types of actions to substitute for each other.  At one endpoint of the continuum are person-to-person services, at the other are self-service ones, and in between are those in which technology enhances person-to-person services.

This perspective makes "substituting information for interaction" a unifying concept in service system design.  It applies to the P2P to Self-service continuum, and also lets us understand a similar continuum between "experience-intensive" and "information-intensive" service systems that have up to now have been thought to require different design concepts.