Chapter 7. The Four Dimensions of Digital Service
A company’s ability to co-create value through digital service manifests along multiple dimensions. Customers judge the quality of their experience across all dimensions inseparably. Just as with a restaurant that offers great food but lousy service, a software service organization will lose customers if it falls short in any of these areas. It needs to approach them as truly being different dimensions of a unified whole.
Traditionally, formal QA activities have focused primarily on validating functional correctness. In order to ensure their ability to view themselves and their customers more holistically, digital service organizations need to take a more holistic approach to QA. They need to reimagine QA as a feedback mechanism for service, not just software, in the process transforming it into a proxy that helps the entire organization empathize with its customers.
As part of this transformation, they must shift their focus away from the software, and toward the customer. From that perspective, we can define four dimensions along which customers judge digital service quality:
- Outcomes
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The extent to which software functionality enables desirable customer outcomes
- Access
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The extent to which operations enables customer access to software functionality in order to accomplish those outcomes
- Coherency
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The extent to which a service enables coherent customer journeys
- Continuity
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The extent to which a service continuously redesigns ...
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