“Untact”: a new customer service strategy in the digital age

Abstract

The Industry 4.0 era has brought a shift in consumers' purchasing behaviors from traditional retailing to online and/or mobile channels, triggered by advanced digital technologies and an easy access to the global market. Smart digital devices and advanced technologies have enabled "untact" service, facilitating customer encounters without a face-to-face contact with employees. This study presents the concept of untact service based on a review of the literature on technology-enabled customer encounters with service providers and analysis of several real-world cases. The results indicate that untact services are becoming widespread in various areas of daily life, such as ordering food at franchise restaurants via digital devices, handling financial transactions without visiting a bank branch through e-banking apps, and using online or mobile order systems for a multitude of products/services. This study elaborates implications of untact service in terms of new opportunities and challenges involved when it is implemented as a new customer service strategy.

The effect of coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) risk perception on behavioural intention towards ‘untact’ tourism in South Korea during the first wave of the pandemic (March 2020)

“…Untact is a newly coined word first introduced in the book 'Trend Korea 2018', referring to consumption behaviour that minimizes face-to-face contact (Kim, 2017). Lee and Lee (2020) highlighted untact as a new customer service strategy in the digital era. They stated that the individualist characteristics of modern people who want to avoid unnecessary contact with others have displayed a preference for untact consumption, especially thanks to technological innovation (Lee & Lee, 2020).…”

Risk management-based security evaluation model for telemedicine systems

“…The proposed model uses attack tree modeling to evaluate the ASP and AOP to estimate the total risks of remote healthcare systems, accounting for security threats. This report provides a method of evaluating cybersecurity risks in remote medical systems, an area of technological convergence for recently illuminated untact (i.e., nonface-to-face) [56] medical services. The limits of the proposed model are that the technical environment of the hospital should be considered when applying the model to the telemedicine system and the participation of telemedicine professionals is necessary.…”

“…In future research, additional cyber risk modeling paradigms will be investigated, such as binary decision-making diagrams and Markov models, to identify the limitations of their representativeness and their abilities to quantify and mitigate risks. In addition, research on ways to identify and mitigate new security threats to telemedicine will be needed, as the need for untact (i.e., non-face-to-face) [56] medical services increase due to issues related to infectious diseases such as CoV. Theoretical generalizations for these mathematical modeling techniques will then be developed to overcome these limitations.…”

Lessons Learned from Battling COVID-19: The Korean Experience

“…“Untact” means no human-to-human contact in service encounters [ 17 ]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Korea has been able to provide untact services to its population based on innovative applications of digital technologies.…”

“…Thus, the digital infrastructure and operational innovations play renewed significant roles [ 8 , 16 ]. For example, online-ordered deliveries, curbside pickups, and “untact” (no human contact) services are flourishing [ 17 ]. With the increased demand for remote and untact services, many innovative apps are also being developed (e.g., apps to locate the nearest place to purchase masks, to have a rental car delivered to the house, to have desired meals delivered in the shortest time, etc.)…”