E-Design and E-Development of Real Estate Services in Russia

Background

How do you know the quality of a product? You can pick up an iPhone, inspect the stitching on a suit, or test drive a Mercedes. But services are often intangible. You cannot hold your bank or cell phone accounts in your hand. These accounts grant you access to infrastructure, such as the ubiquitous “cloud” or the bank’s ATM network, much of which you only ever see a tiny amount of. This makes it hard for potential customers to evaluate quality. Many critical services, such as insurance and healthcare, are long-term investments in a possible future scenario. In these cases the customer does not even discover the quality of the service until long after they have paid for it, and often at the very worst moment—when disaster strikes. Services are not totally intangible, of course. A customer might not be able to hold her bank account in her hand, but she will interact with many parts of the service. The ATM card, online banking website, smartphone app, branches, staff, marketing material, and tedious security shenanigans are all tangible touch points of the service. Somebody has to design all of those touch points, and you’ve probably even designed a few of them yourself. But often they are not designed as a coherent whole. Instead each touch point channel is the domain of a different silo within an organization.