Abstract
Current recommender systems employ item-centric properties to estimate ratings and present the results to the user. However, recent studies highlight the fact that the stages of item fruition also involve extrinsic factors, such as the interaction with the service provider before, during and after item selection. In other words, a holistic view of consumer experience, including local properties of items, as well as consumers’ perceptions of item fruition, should be adopted to enhance user awareness and decision-making. In this work, we integrate recommender systems with service models to reason about the different stages of item fruition. By exploiting the Service Journey Maps to define service-based item and user profiles, we develop a novel family of recommender systems that evaluate items by taking preference management and overall consumer experience into account. Moreover, we introduce a two-level visual model to provide users with different information about recommendation results: (i) the higher level summarizes consumer experience about items and supports the identification of promising suggestions within a possibly long list of results; (ii) the lower level enables the exploration of detailed data about the local properties of items. In a user test instantiated in the home-booking domain, we compared our models to standard recommender systems. We found that the service-based algorithms that only use item fruition experience excel in ranking and minimize the error in rating estimation. Moreover, the combination of data about item fruition experience and item properties achieves slightly lower recommendation performance; however, it enhances users’ perceptions of the awareness and the decision-making support provided by the system. These results encourage the adoption of service-based models to summarize user preferences and experience in recommender systems.
Highlights
In service modeling research, Stickdorn et al [1] point out that items are complex entities whose fruition might involve stages of interaction with multiple services and actors that jointly impact customer experience
RQ2: Does the presentation of both item properties and service-based information about their fruition enhance users’ awareness about the suggested options, and confidence in the selection decisions, compared to only presenting item properties?. To answer these questions we propose a family of serviceaware recommender systems that evaluate items based on individual user preferences and on evaluation dimensions associated with item fruition stages
In order to address this limitation, we investigated the integration of recommender systems with service modeling to explicitly represent the evaluation dimensions of consumer experience during the stages of item fruition
Summary
Stickdorn et al [1] point out that items are complex entities whose fruition might involve stages of interaction with multiple services and actors that jointly impact customer experience. In online retailing, the satisfaction with products depends both on their properties and on the experience with post-sales services related to customer care. Starting from this considerations, we point out that, when personalizing the recommendation of items, their local features and the expected experience with them should be jointly. Review-based recommender systems study consumer feedback to extract data about people’s experience [4], [5] As they do not contextualize reviews in the stages of item fruition to which consumers are exposed, these algorithms cannot aggregate information in an effective way. A SJM is a visual description of user experience with a service, such as a hotel, or an online retailer, which models the stages that customers encounter during service fruition. We define a small set of evaluation dimensions that a service-aware recommender system can exploit (possibly fusing them with information about item properties) (i) to estimate item ratings and (ii) to generate a visual overview of recommendation lists, based on a holistic summary of previous consumers’ experience with items
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