Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The service ecosystem
Customer experiences take place within an often complex system of several services, products
and organizations: the so-called service ecosystem. Touchpoints of a customer journey take
place on various on- and off-line channels and include other customers, stakeholders and even
competitors. All these services, products, stakeholders, places, devices and many others form an
ecosystem in which many of these actors depend on each other. An often used example in this
context is the customer experience of an iPod. This depends on the look and feel of the device
itself, but also on the user experience of the software, the marketing activities by Apple, the
shopping experience in the store, the unpacking of the product and so on. However, the service
system only works with iTunes as a platform to simply buy music and videos, with other devices
like a computer to run the software, and predominantly with numerous people producing and
sharing or selling music on this platform as well as intermediaries such as music labels and record
companies. A similar - yet even more complex example - would be smartphones (Android,
Windows, Apple, etc.) with their respective operating systems, platforms, markets and numerous
Apps including their companies, developers, related products and so on. In 2011 an email
became known from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop to his employees (various sources, e.g. Ziegler
2011). In his 'Burning Platforms' memo, Elop summarized what he felt was wrong with Nokia's
ecosystem:
The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not
only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce,
advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unifi ed communications and
many other things. Our competitors aren't taking our market share with devices; they are
taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we're going to have to decide
how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.
(Elop cited in: Ziegler 2011)
Also tourism destinations can be analyzed as service ecosystems, whereby such an ecosystem
goes beyond the mere physical actors within the destination itself - just like the described eco-
system of an iPod or smartphone goes beyond the mere product. A destination incorporates
various frontstage services (accommodation, transportation, food and beverage, shops, leisure
activities, etc.), backstage services (grocery supply, laundry, maintenance, construction industry,
etc.), products (TV, computer, facilities, sport and leisure equipment, etc.), organizations (DMO,
government, tour operator, travel agent, etc.) as well as various frontstage platforms (destination
websites, hotel review sites, etc.) and backstage platforms (destination information and manage-
ment software). Tourists seek a seamless experience throughout the whole customer journey
within this ecosystem. The overall experience depends on the coordination between all involved
stakeholders and their individual customer experience. Only if most single actors within the
destination ecosystem provide good customer experiences, the ecosystem as a whole is healthy
and stable. Just as an ecosystem can cope with only a limited number of parasites, a destination
can cope with only a few stakeholders providing bad customer experiences. Consequently, if
there are too many parasites an ecosystem breaks down - and so does a destination.
There is a growing interest in academic research on service ecosystems. Although most of the
research focuses on service ecosystems in the context of information systems (e.g. Barros
et al
.
2005; Barros and Dumas 2006; Sawatani 2007), using different terminology, service ecosystems
have been researched in other areas as for example 'Service Value Network', 'Business Webs' or
'Internet of Services' (Riedl
et al
. 2009). Such inter-organizational networks are closely linked to
the idea of open innovation (Vanhaverbeke and Cloodt 2006; Chesbrough 2003). Beside the
