Inclusive Service Experience Management: a Framework from the Perspective of People with Visual Impairment.
| Autor | Conrad, Bibiana |
I Introduction
Being different and becoming memorable to consumers and partners is one of the great challenges for managers in the service industry, as ways of thinking and consuming are constantly evolving and often aspects that were once perceived as differential are today considered parity attributes. Seeking to build a global view on the scientific research on services and to support businesses in order to set them apart in the market, Ostrom et al. (2010) and Ostrom, Parasuraman, Bowen, Patricio, and Voss (2015) identified the greatest gaps between the research priorities and current knowledge evidenced by scientific production.
These studies englobe service researchers' perspectives throughout more than 37 countries and show that "improving well-being through transformative services" is the second theme with the greatest gap between the importance of a social and economic issue vs. the current knowledge about it (Ostrom et al., 2015), "Stimulating service innovation" and "Enhancing the service experience" research subjects are in fourth and seventh place in these studies, respectively. Thus, there is a need to promote studies focusing on empathy for the construction and management of the service experience.
It is important to analyze how customers interact with the service by considering the environment where it is experienced, the processes throughout the service delivery, and the personal interactions throughout the experience (Bolton, Gustafsson, McColl-Kennedy, Sirianni, & Tse, 2014; Zeithaml, Bitner, & Gremler, 2014). However, from which perspective should service experiences be looked at when consumers are visually impaired?
According to the World Health Organization (2014a), visual impairment affects more than 285 million people worldwide, and 90% of the cases are concentrated in poor or developing countries, as is the case of Brazil. The 2010 Census data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE, 2010) corroborate this, noting that visual impairment is a condition experienced by more than 35.7 million people (19% of the population) in the country.
These results show that the reality of part of the world's population when using services is quite different from that of the majority, which leads it to being questioned whether the instruments adopted to manage the service experience encompass the needs of visually impaired people. This is especially relevant within the context of the Brazilian marketplace, where the Brazilian Law on the Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities n. 13,146 (2015) was recently sanctioned, requiring business owners to ensure and promote conditions of equality on their premises, while the same time only a few studies have so far focused on service experience management by embracing the perspective of visually impaired people. Considering that the services sector has been responsible for more than 60% of Brazil's GDP in the last two decades (IBGE, 2015), such studies into new ways of managing services have the power to create the utmost positive impact if they are followed by actions that solve real consumers' problems.
In order to mobilize this discussion to support not only business owners but also academia, contributing to a reduction of gaps in the scientific production between social and service experience innovation paradigms, this article proposes a framework for service experience management from the perspective of people with visual impairment, analyzing aspects related to physical evidence, the service cycle, and the personal interactions in services.
The study behind this proposal was based on design science research and characterized as qualitative, using the respective methodological framework for technical collection and analysis. The framework proposition oriented toward understanding and discussing the service experience phenomenon corroborates studies such as those of Nasution, Sembada, Miliani, Resti, and Prawono (2014), Tsiros and Parasuraman (2006), and Verhoef et al. (2009). As underlined by Verhoef et al. (2009), a framework proposition is indicated when there is a conceptual shortage, as observed in this case, particularly when the theme concerns the service experience for visually impaired people.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Visual impairment and service experience
Brazilian Decree No. 5,296 (2004) considers visual impairment to be characterized according to the visual acuity of each person, where blindness is diagnosed when the person's acuity in their best-seeing eye is equal to or less than 0.05, even with optical correction; while low vision is defined when visual acuity is between 0.05 and 0.3 in their best-seeing eye, even with optical correction. The sum of the visual field measurements in both eyes is also considered and if it is equal to or less than 0.6 the person is diagnosed with visual impairment. It should be noted that the term severe visual impairment encompasses cases of blindness and low vision and this is the group focused on in this article.
"People with visual impairment have not been widely studied as a consumer group," according to Yu, Tullio-Pow, and Akhtar (2015, p. 122), even though there is a significant percentage of visually impaired consumers worldwide, according to the WHO (2014b). This is evident from a bibliometric review on the subject carried out in the Scopus, Science Direct, Spell, EBSCO, and Emerald (2015) databases, focusing on the Business, Management, and Accounting fields.
In terms of international research on customer experience from the perspective of visually impaired people, it is possible to find studies focused more on how hardware and physical experience could be improved through assistive technology (Ando, 2008; Jutla & Kanevsky, 2009; Moayeri, Mapar, Tompkins, & Pahlavan, 2011; Sandnes et al., 2012), as well as how digital interaction with visually impaired customers is enhanced by accessibility (Yu & Parmanto, 2011; Youngblood, 2013; Zia & Fatima, 2011). Particularly regarding on-site service experiences, Baker (2006) and Baker, Stephens, and Hill (2002) are a reference in the United States market. The authors make some assumptions, such as: the market can provide the benefit of independence for visually impaired consumers; visually impaired consumers have a well-defined and different set of needs to people with other disabilities, and this can be used to create managerial tactics; and consumers with visual impairment claim that they are labeled due to their disability and this leads to misunderstandings.
Yu et al. (2015) are also a reference regarding the main challenges encountered during retail shopping experiences in Canada and these can be separated into aspects related to tangible service factors such as access and mobility within the store, use of distinctive colors, legibility of labels, signage inside the store, and receipts, lighting, and furniture layout, among other things, and intangible service factors, such as interaction with service providers and the checkout process.
Although most cases of visual impairment are concentrated in poor or developing countries, as previously mentioned as being the case of Brazil (WHO, 2014a), only a few studies cover the issue of visual impairment and its relationship with some elements of the service experience within the context of the Brazilian marketplace. Dischinger and Jackson (2006, 2012) and Souza and Moraes (2013) evaluated accessibility in public places. For Dischinger and Jackson (2006), three elements are fundamental to working on urban scenarios: 1) creating a channel of communication with users so that they are involved at all stages; 2) understanding that the technical knowledge of engineers and architects, for example, should be complemented with different visions to generate innovative solutions, given the complex nature of this problem; and finally, 3) understanding the political and economic context of the associations and public institutions involved in the process is a key success factor.
Faria and Motta (2011) and Faria and Silva (2012), on the other hand, specifically searched for experiences in leisure and food services. The former addressed barriers to the consumption of travel packages, noting that there are intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural restrictions for consumption by the visually impaired. The 2012 research studied how to improve the restaurant experience, including attributes such as menu, attendance, ambience, table format, waiter access, table turnover, location, and food.
Some elements regarding the scenario, processes, and people are part of this set, reinforcing the idea that customers perceive the experience in a holistic way. This can also be seen in the study by Pinto and Freitas (2013), who addressed the purchasing experience for people with visual impairment in Minas Gerais. The authors state that the consumption experience has a symbolic meaning of belonging, autonomy, and hedonism.
There has been an unquestionable contribution from both international and Brazilian papers to the construction of the framework proposed in this article, which intends to fill a gap in the scientific production on service experience innovation and the promotion of wellbeing, applied to a developing country context. Only 12 researchers (3.6% of the total) involved in the Ostrom et al. (2015) survey are from Latin America, evidencing a massive opportunity to take the scientific production in this field to the next level, not only covering the reality of emergent marketplaces, but also creating the chance to build parallels between the constructs for service experience management in developed and poor countries.
As previously mentioned, people with visual impairment have not been widely studied from a business perspective, especially in the wider context of customer experience management. For this reason, the following topics aim to present customer experience and service marketing theories...
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