This paper focuses on the development of a mobile service as extension of travel agencies' sales channels, fundamentally driven by the notion of value co-creation. Design goals are directly linked to the understanding of travel counselling as practical value co-creation and to the concern to progress this understanding throughout the travel customer cycle. Customers as well as travel agencies benefit from a mobile service rooted in value co-creation. Mobile service applications which target a service provision which furthermore is in line with the core competency of a travel agency (advice-giving and continuously accompany the customer) are scarce. Taking this as a starting point, we propose a mobile service and system design which provides a travel customer with continuing support on the trip, suitable to complement a lively, ongoing customer-firm interaction which enables the co-creation of value, ultimately targeting increased customer retention and loyalty.

This article describes a multiloop design approach, demonstrating two concatenated build-and-evaluate loops of a project that aims at enhancing and improving tele-counseling at travel agency call-centers. The socio-technical system design intends to implement and support a collaborative travel counseling concept which equalizes travel agents and customers within a value co-created service encounter to resolve the specific problems in travel agency call-centers. The design is finally guided by four instrumental goals: (1) increase transparency, (2) improve information quality, (3) support joint problem solving, and (4) create advisory experience. While the first build-and-evaluate loop mainly enhanced the workplace picture, the second build-and-evaluate loop primarily revealed organizational demands. This indicates that the proposed design approach enables sequentially broadening the problem space for design and supports iteratively moving forward the utility of the emerging artifact. Design is informed by concatenating insights from the previous loops which enrich understanding of the instrumental goals. The presented goals as well as the design approach are encouraging candidates for additional testing as a base for general design principles.

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