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Developing business ideas for drone technologies
Developing business ideas for drone technologies

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1.2 Customer relationships

Customer relationships portray the type of relationship established with each customer segment. The question to be considered when designing this building block is: what type of relationship will be developed with the customer?

Osterwalder et al. (2010, p. 29) identified six types of customer relationships:

  • Personal assistance: the customer refers to a representative in person or through a media (e.g. by phone, online) to receive support in the transaction or in the relationship with the company.
  • Dedicated personal assistance: a dedicated assistant is assigned to the customer to provide a single point of contact. You may think this is reserved for wealthy clients using particular services, however that’s not always the case. For instance, some people may appreciate dedicated personal assistance by being seen by the same general practitioner or doctor.
  • Self-service: the customer completes the purchase autonomously without interacting with personnel. Vending machines and self-service counters, which have replaced many personal assistants in large shops, are typical examples of this type of customer relationship.
  • Automated service: this mode of service combines self-service with customisation based on automatic profiling of the customer. In doing so, it tries to personalise the relationship with the customer. Online stores like Amazon profile clients according to data collected such as previous purchases and searches. This approach is expanding: grocery stores have launched apps that offer personalised discounts to their clients on the basis of their profile.
  • Communities: the customer or user creates communities around a particular product or service. This is the case for software users. The popular statistical packages Stata or R have communities of users, such as researchers, who develop and share code for performing specific analyses. The knowledge exchange among members of the community allows members to have their needs solved by the contributions of other members or to ask questions to the community. Communities are also important for collecting valuable information on products and services. This is typical in software development, where communities develop around a specific software. The ICAERUS platform contains a library [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] of models, algorithms and datasets that are shared freely and enable the development of drone applications.
  • Co-creation: the customer and service provider develop value together. This is the case of YouTube and other multi-sided business models where its value depends on the participation of different parties towards the development of products and services.