Advisory Service Support that Works: Enhancing Service Quality with a Mixed-reality System

Modern technology promises to improve service encounters by automated documentation or better decision traceability. At the same time, research suggests negative impact of technology on human-to-human advisory services: including technology might negatively impact the interpersonal communication and enforce unpleasant behaviors. Consequently, despite the obvious improvements, technology might have negative impact on how the participants perceive the service. This might imply serious consequences for the service provider: unsatisfied clients, ineffective information exchange, or intransparency. This slows down the diffusion of technology into advisory services in banks or insurance companies and so designing systems for use in interpersonal services remains a challenge. This article provides evidence that LivePaper, a system designed along the material practices of a financial advisory encounter, helps improving important service quality dimensions, turning the services not only more pleasant for the participants, but also improving key marketing and business metrics of the service. In experimental advisory services, the sessions supported with LivePaper outperformed conventional services with regard to overall bank service quality and satisfaction, salesperson listening and interaction rating scores, as well as information transparency. This shows that carefully designed system does not only preserve the perceived quality of a service but might improve it and has implications on the marketing and business value of the service.