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

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.

The Role of Business Model Innovation in the IT Services Sector: a Comprehensive Mapping Review

“…Since that publication a range of novel IT technologies, namely, Cloud Storage (Clohessy et al, 2017;Levy et al, 2022), Big Data (Khalife & Dunay, 2019;Mortati et al, 2023), augmented/ virtual reality (Mattila et al, 2018), Blockchain (Kloeckner et al, 2021) and virtual platform technologies (Schneider et al, 2017;Oettl et al, 2018;Pousttchi & Gleiss, 2019;Schaffer et al, 2021;Poeppelbuss et al, 2022) have emerged and have motivated managed services business models to use them.…”

“…If customers require innovative solutions, these are developed in close interaction with the customer. Selling processes are solution-oriented and are based on knowledge interchange between a customer and a provider at an eye level (Mattila et al, 2018). Consultative selling has proven as an effective strategy in customer relationship management and is targeted at extending customer relationships form the development process to the phase of utilizing the service.…”

“…Businesses also use augmented reality features in product marketing to involve customers more intensely and mediate a three-or four-dimensional feeling of the end product, particularly when the latter is made to order, for example, not available at the moment of buying (Chylinski et al, 2020). Since the professional application of virtual and augmented reality technologies is still complex and requires high computation power, expert managed service providers support businesses effectively (Mattila et al, 2018).…”

Stakeholder Strategy and Design Alignment Framework for Design Science Research – A Study in the Context of VR-Aided Marketing and Sales

“…There are also an increasing number of academic studies considering the marketing and sales potential of VR technologies (e.g. [6,7,38,58]) but only a few [41,44] using the DSR approach. Therefore, it is widely unknown how different stakeholders such as companies adopting these technologies, VR technology developers, and endcustomers, perceive the use of VR as a part of the marketing and sales funnel activities.…”