Coming to a smartphone near you: Personalized experiences

Consumers find service apps increasingly personal and helpful

2013-02-19

(Press-News.org) CHESTNUT HILL, MA (February 19, 2013) – Say au revoir to the concierge.

The proliferation of technology focused on finding the best tickets, the hottest restaurants or the next flight out of town may mean it's time to bid adieu to the concierge and other traditional service information gatekeepers, according to new research.

Face-to-face interactions with front desk clerks and concierges are not essential for personalized service, and increasingly these encounters are being substituted with Smartphone apps and other automated service systems, according to a study in the current edition of the Journal of Service Research.

Business travelers who frequent the same hotels time and again may develop personal relationships with certain concierges over time, but a "smart digital assistant" app can provide consistent personalized recommendations for every customer, every time, no matter where they are, the researchers report.

"Recognizing that person-to-person interactions and information systems are substitutes for each other helps managers and service designers make better decisions about the investments needed to collect, store, and process information about customers and interactions," says Professor Robert J. Glushko of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-author of the new study.

Service providers can collect information about customer preferences through methods such as customer satisfaction forms and tracking "likes" on Facebook or other social media. But automated service systems and applications can capture both explicit and implicit feedback, and do it in the most complete and effective way possible. Already, service systems can record customers' choices, track navigation or record web browsing behavior. Almost instantaneously, these systems can exploit that information to personalize future recommendations.

"Imagine an app that combines TripIt, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and a personal assistant, all into one," explains Boston College Accenture Professor of Marketing and Journal of Service Research editor Katherine Lemon. "These types of applications have the power to re-shape the service landscape across multiple industries."

Co-authors Glushko and Karen Joy Nomorosa, a senior semantic analyst at Rearden Commerce, Inc., envision an app that personalizes customer experiences by developing personalized systems that integrate across all service platforms, from hotels, to dining, to booking flights.

Of course, there are still customers who enjoy the "lazy chatty conversation with a bank teller or hotel front desk clerk," Nomorosa points out, but "for every customer who enjoys a lazy chat, there is surely someone who wants a minimalist information-driven experience."

### The Journal of Service Research is edited by Katherine Lemon, Accenture Professor of Marketing at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, and published by Sage in Thousand Oaks, California.

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

'Growing' medicines in plants requires new regulations

2013-02-19

Scientists say amending an EU directive on GMOs could help stimulate innovation in making vaccines, cheaper pharmaceuticals and organic plastics using plants. In a paper to be published in Current Pharmaceutical Design, six scientists from the US and Europe compare risk assessment and regulation between the two continents. They will run a web chat on the subject with Sense About Science from 12-1 on Wednesday 20th February. In the EU, plant-made pharmaceuticals have to be authorised in the same way as GM agricultural crops. In theory, agricultural crops can be grown ...

Quick, efficient chip cleans up common flaws in amateur photographs

2013-02-19

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Your smartphone snapshots could be instantly converted into professional-looking photographs with just the touch of a button, thanks to a processor chip developed at MIT. The chip, built by a team at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory, can perform tasks such as creating more realistic or enhanced lighting in a shot without destroying the scene's ambience, in just a fraction of a second. The technology could be integrated with any smartphone, tablet computer or digital camera. Existing computational photography systems tend to be software applications ...

Abnormal growth regulation may occur in children with heart defects

2013-02-19

The poor growth seen in children born with complex heart defects may result from factors beyond deficient nutrition. A new study by pediatric researchers suggests that abnormalities in overall growth regulation play a role. "When compared with their healthy peers, children with congenital heart disease have impaired growth, as measured in weight, length, and head circumference," said senior author Meryl S. Cohen, M.D., a pediatric cardiologist in the Cardiac Center at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "We investigated patterns of poor growth in these children, ...

Is there a link between childhood obesity and ADHD, learning disabilities?

2013-02-19

URBANA – A University of Illinois study has established a possible link between high-fat diets and such childhood brain-based conditions as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and memory-dependent learning disabilities. "We found that a high-fat diet rapidly affected dopamine metabolism in the brains of juvenile mice, triggering anxious behaviors and learning deficiencies. Interestingly, when methylphenidate (Ritalin) was administered, the learning and memory problems went away," said Gregory Freund, a professor in the U of I College of Medicine and a member ...

Steroid injection may lead to worse outcomes in patients with spinal stenosis

2013-02-19

Philadelphia, Pa. (February 19, 2013) - For patients with spinal stenosis, epidural steroid injections (ESI) may actually lead to worse outcomes—whether or not the patient later undergoes surgery, according to a study in the February 15 issue of Spine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. The study raises questions about the benefits of steroid injection—a widely used treatment for the common problem of spinal stenosis in the lower (lumbar) spine. "There was no improvement in outcome with ESI whether patients were ...

Thigh fat may be to blame for older adults who slow down

2013-02-19

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. – Feb. 19, 2013 – A new study from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center shows that an increase in fat throughout the thigh is predictive of mobility loss in otherwise healthy older adults. Lead author Kristen Beavers, Ph.D., and colleagues at Wake Forest Baptist said the findings suggest that prevention of age-related declines in walking speed isn't just about preserving muscle mass, it's also about preventing fat gain. Walking speed declines with age, said Beavers, and in older adults slower walking speed is a predictor of disability, nursing home ...

Degenerative cervical spine disease may not progress over time

2013-02-19

Philadelphia, Pa. (February 19, 2013) - Follow-up data on patients with degenerative disease of the upper (cervical) spinal vertebrae show little or no evidence of worsening degeneration over time, according to a study in the February 15 issue of Spine. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health. For many patients with "unstable" cervical degenerative spondylolisthesis, observation may be a better choice than surgery, according to the new research by Dr Moon Soo Park and colleagues of Medical College of Hallym University, ...

Breakthrough study opens door to broader biomedical applications for Raman spectroscopy

2013-02-19

Amsterdam, NL, 19 February 2013 – Raman spectroscopy has enabled incredible advances in numerous scientific fields and is a powerful tool for tissue classification and disease recognition, although there have been considerable challenges to using the method in a clinical setting. Scientists have now demonstrated the advantages of wavelength-modulated Raman spectroscopy, opening the door to wider biomedical and clinical applications such as real-time assessment of tissues during surgery. This study is published in Biomedical Spectroscopy and Imaging. The inelastic scattering ...

Males' superior spatial ability likely is not an evolutionary adaptation

2013-02-19

Males and females differ in a lot of traits (besides the obvious ones) and some evolutionary psychologists have proposed hypotheses to explain why. Some argue, for example, that males' slight, but significant, superiority in spatial navigation over females – a phenomenon demonstrated repeatedly in many species, including humans – is probably "adaptive," meaning that over the course of evolutionary history the trait gave males an advantage that led them to have more offspring than their peers. A new analysis published in The Quarterly Review of Biology found no support ...

Sports, shared activities are 'game changers' for dad/daughter relationships, Baylor study finds

2013-02-19

The most frequent turning point in father-daughter relationships is shared activity — especially sports — ahead of such pivotal events as when a daughter marries or leaves home, according to a study by Baylor University researchers. "This is the masculine style of building closeness — called 'closeness in the doing' – whereas the feminine orientation is talking, 'closeness in the dialogue,'" said Mark T. Morman, Ph.D., a professor of communication in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. An article about the findings by Morman and former Baylor graduate student Elizabeth ...

New study charts how Earth’s global temperature has drastically changed over the past 485 million years, driven by carbon dioxide

Scientists say we have enough evidence to agree global action on microplastics

485 million-year temperature record of Earth reveals Phanerozoic climate variability

[Press-News.org] Coming to a smartphone near you: Personalized experiences
Consumers find service apps increasingly personal and helpful

Coming to a smartphone near you: Personalized experiences

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: