Enriching the service cultural experiences through augmented reality

Purpose – The role of new technologies and Internet of Things (IoT) (Ashton, 2009) are demonstrated to augment quality and performance of many public and private services industry (Lusch and Nambisan, 2014), including the cultural offerings (Jafari et al., 2013; Siu et al., 2013). This research aims at depicting how new technologies are shaping new service experiences choosing the cultural business as context of analysis where innovative offerings are based on the cultural content of an artwork partnered by the usage of new immersive context to favour the satisfaction of latent needs and the innovation in service provision. Design/methodology/approach – As part of our empirical study we analyse the service experience of users participating into a new project – Databenc –, launched to improve cultural-based and touristic-based offerings in Naples. We conducted narrative interviews with Event-Based Narrative Interview Technique (EBNIT) (Helkkula and Pihlström 2010). The interviews explore the challenges people have in their service experience and their innovative ideas how these challenges could be solved. Originality/value – Our contribution is framed into the literature about service experience and it aims at complementing the recent contributions on the role of new technologies in supporting both the organizations in proposing services in new ways and the visitors to be more satisfied through the immersive approach to visit. The novelty of the topics taken into account can represent even a research avenue for further investigations as several elements of marketing literature about cultural services still need to be analysed. Practical implications – Cultural organizations’ managers can benefit from the results of our analysis as the features of new technologies leading to high levels of satisfaction are highlighted, as it happened in previous contributions when combining the elements of a value proposition to the achieved satisfaction for visitors (Laws, 1998). Moreover, the results are even useful to combine the features of each visitor to the main elements of the new technologies employed in order to understand how to frame services in a better way and how suitable are the tools provided to visitors in order to favour service experiences (Andereck et al., 2006).