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Articles by Ryan Buell
The Hidden Costs of Working Multiple Jobs: Implications for Spending Behavior and Wellbeing
Across three studies, combining survey data, transaction-level analysis from 90,548 customers of a nationwide retail bank, and insights from the General Social Survey, we study whether people with multiple jobs spend their labor income differently than people who earn the same total income from a single job.
(HBm+) Kundenservice: Eine gute Beziehung zum Kunden zahlt sich aus
Illustration: Alex Eben Meyer Weiterlesen mit Harvard Business manager+ Das Wissen der Besten – zu den wichtigen Fragen rund um Führung, Strategie und Management. Wir liefern Ihnen Knowhow aus den renommiertesten Hochschulen der Welt, anschaulich und umsetzbar für Ihren Alltag als Führungskraft.
Elevate Employees, Don’t Eliminate Them
A traumatic discontinuity like the Covid-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to reconnect on fresh terms—with families, friends, coworkers, and even ourselves. For businesses this moment provides a chance to reimagine the role employees play in customer service. Even before the pandemic, technology was increasingly making it possible for employers to automate interactions with customers; thus many managers will instinctively look for ways to eliminate jobs.
Can Shared Service Delivery Increase Customer Engagement? A Study of Shared Medical Appointments
Author Abstract Customers and providers alike often consider one-on-one service delivery to be ideal, assuming—perhaps unquestioningly—that devoting individualized attention maximizes customer engagement and improves outcomes. Alternatively, shared service delivery, in which customers are served in batch, may, through the dynamics of group interaction, lead to increased customer engagement.
Improving Customer Compatibility with Operational Transparency
Author Abstract Through a large-scale field experiment with 389,611 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run engagement. Although we find transparency to have an insignificant effect on acquisition rates, customers who were shown each offering’s tradeoffs selected different products than those who were not.
How Transparency into Internal and External Responsibility Initiatives Influences Consumer Choice
Author Abstract Amid growing calls for transparency and social and environmental responsibility, companies are employing different strategies to improve consumer perceptions of their brands. Some pursue internal initiatives that reduce their negative social or environmental impacts through responsible operations practices (such as paying a living wage to workers or engaging in environmentally sustainable manufacturing).
Why Anxious Customers Prefer Human Customer Service
DNY59/Getty Images When people feel anxious, it’s human nature to turn to others for help. For example, an apprehensive taxpayer might want guidance from an IRS agent in interpreting a new tax law. A distressed patient might want to speak with a nurse when making sense of his blood test results. This type of behavior is quite common.
Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training on Performance
Author Abstract Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the performance consequences of gamified training by conducting a field experiment in a professional services firm. We find that the main effect of adopting the gamified training platform on performance is not statistically significant at conventional levels.
Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact
Author Abstract It is a well-established result in social psychology that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. However, increasingly companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial services, health care, and education) are deploying self-service technologies (SSTs), through which anxious customers transact without human contact. The impact of customer anxiety on service relationships is neither well understood, nor consistently factored into service design.
Show Your Customers How Hard You’re Working for Them
Idea in Brief The Dilemma Conventional wisdom holds that the more contact an operation has with its customers, the less efficiently it will run. But when customers are partitioned away from the operation, they are less likely to fully understand and appreciate the work going on behind the scenes, thereby placing a lower value on the product or service being offered.
Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices
Author Abstract We study how transparency into the levels and changes of relative sustainability performance affects consumer choices. Our work considers two forms of transparency: process transparency, in which customers receive information about the company's sustainability performance relative to other companies, and customer transparency, in which customers receive information about their own sustainability performance relative to other customers.
Creating Reciprocal Value Through Operational Transparency
We investigate whether organizations can create value by introducing visual transparency between consumers and producers. Although operational transparency has been shown to improve consumer perceptions of service value, existing theory posits that increased contact between consumers and producers may diminish work performance.
Deadstock, VNDS, Beaters, Colorways, Resellers, and Grails
Jay-Z once told Vanity Fair, “When you’re accustomed to wealth, you don’t show it, right? That’s why the white kids in school could wear bummy sneakers; it’s almost like, don’t show wealth — that’s crass.” While times have certainly changed since Sean Carter was wearing Nikes in homeroom, his quote illustrates something important about the sneaker subculture: the role of sneakers as a symbol. Any established community or group uses symbols as signals of group membership.
Babcom: Opening Doors
Buell, Ryan W., Joshua D. Margolis, and Margot Eiran. "Babcom: Opening Doors." Harvard Business School Case 418-026, June 2018. (Revised July 2018.)
Improving Access at VA
In 2015, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) ran the largest healthcare system in the United States, with over 1,700 sites of care that served nearly 9 million veterans. One year earlier, a scandal had erupted over a cover-up of the excessive wait times veterans faced to get medical appointments in some VA facilities.
HBR: The parts of customer service that should never be automated
Editor's note : This story is available via the Harvard Business Review. It and other HBR stories are provided to our subscribers on our website (and in our daily emails) as an added value to your subscription. In Pixar's "WALL-E," oversized humans recline on levitating barcaloungers and are dressed, primped, polished and served, entirely by robots. Fiction? Maybe not, at least according to a wave of media coverage pointing to a dizzying array of service innovations on the horizon.
The Parts of Customer Service That Should Never Be Automated
In Pixar’s WALL-E, oversized humans recline on levitating barcaloungers and are dressed, primped, polished, and served, entirely by robots. Fiction? Maybe not; consider Amazon Go or a whole host of other automated services in which machines take the place of humans. While some of these innovations have promise, it’s unlikely that they will fully take over due to the psychology behind how and why we prefer human interaction in many cases.
Last Place Aversion in Queues
Overview — While no one likes standing in line for service, being last intensifies the pain of waiting, doubles the probability of switching queues, and quadruples the chances of leaving the line altogether. Many service settings could be improved if managers actively mitigated last place aversion. This paper investigates whether people exhibit last place aversion in queues and its implications for their experiences and behaviors in service environments.
QJE
We present evidence from laboratory experiments showing that individuals are “last-place averse.” Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. In modified-dictator games, participants randomly placed in second-to-last place are the most likely to give money to the person one rank above them instead of the person one rank below.
A Transformation Is Under Way at U.S. Veterans Affairs. We Got an Inside Look.
In 2014, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs was in crisis. The agency, which provides health care to approximately 9 million veterans at over 1,700 locations, had set a top-down goal to increase the percentage of veterans who were seen within 14 days of requesting an appointment.
Case Study: Can an Airline Cut “Turn Times” Without Adding Staff?
Kentaro Hayashi buttoned his uniform shirt and wondered if he could really pull this off. As president of RSA Ground, the subsidiary of Rising Sun Airlines responsible for servicing its planes at airports across Japan, he’d been under enormous pressure in recent months. Thanks to increased demand for air travel, Rising Sun’s flights were now fuller and more frequent than ever before.
“Last-Place Aversion”: Evidence and Redistributive Implications*
We present evidence from laboratory experiments showing that individuals are “last-place averse.” Participants choose gambles with the potential to move them out of last place that they reject when randomly placed in other parts of the distribution. In modified-dictator games, participants randomly placed in second-to-last place are the most likely to give money to the person one rank above them instead of the person one rank below.
Think Customers Hate Waiting? Not So Fast…
How often have you found yourself staring at your computer screen as a progress bar tracks the machine’s fitful loading of an application or completion of a search and wondered, “What’s taking so long?” Good managers worry about wait time because a great deal of evidence (not to mention common sense) suggests that reducing it can increase customer satisfaction. Our research, however, demonstrates that a different approach—simply showing people what is taking so long—gets better results.
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