Deriving Principles for Guiding Service Encounters: A Participative Design Research Approach

Driven by the rising customer expectations and decreasing budgets, organizations are searching for means to improve service encounters with their citizens and businesses. However, many initiatives take an organizational perspective, whereas service encounters emphasize the client perspective. This research follows a participative design research approach that focuses on the derivation, demonstration and infusion of principles for improved service encounters. A role-playing game refers to a situation in which human participants play a certain role and follow a script to simulate complex service encounters. From the perspective of the professional, these principles emphasize “doing the right things” in their service encounters with customers. The authors found that the approach for deriving principles not only enables capturing the experience of professionals in a fun and entertaining manner, but also expands their view on customers and the back-office. This paper makes two contributions to existing work: (1) a participative design method based on role-play games and (2) six principles for service encounters resulting from the role-playing game.