ISSD Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

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.