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Scaling Consultative Selling with Virtual Reality: Design and Evaluation of Digitally Enhanced Services

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Exploring Service Science (IESS 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 331))

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Abstract

Virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies allow creation of powerful customer experiences and illustrative demonstrations especially in use cases that benefit from spatial visualizations. Our study focuses on the natural resource management sector and digitalizing of consultative selling process. More specifically, we look at how to improve customer engagement with the use of virtual reality (VR) and thus digitally scale consultative selling. In this process, a VR application is used to demonstrate various management operations and their economic results. Design research methodology is applied to a pre-development phase and three application development iterations between 2016 and 2018. Data consists of user interviews and video observations (N = 129) during various development iterations and three application development plans. The results show that VR offers an emotionally engaging and illustrative tool in consultative selling. Further, it opens a novel way for interaction between the salesperson and customer and possibilities to scale consultative selling digitally, emphasizing the role of trust.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 27, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Osmo Mattila, Jani Holopainen & Petri Parvinen

  2. Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Tuure Tuunanen

Authors
  1. Osmo Mattila
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  2. Tuure Tuunanen
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  3. Jani Holopainen
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  4. Petri Parvinen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Osmo Mattila .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Gerhard Satzger

  2. INESC TEC, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Lia Patrício

  3. Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Mohamed Zaki

  4. Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Niklas Kühl

  5. Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Peter Hottum

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Mattila, O., Tuunanen, T., Holopainen, J., Parvinen, P. (2018). Scaling Consultative Selling with Virtual Reality: Design and Evaluation of Digitally Enhanced Services. In: Satzger, G., Patrício, L., Zaki, M., Kühl, N., Hottum, P. (eds) Exploring Service Science. IESS 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00713-3_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00713-3_29

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00712-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00713-3

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