Development and preliminary evaluation of a serious game to communicate a digitally enhanced advance service (DEAS) offer

DEAS are a cluster of high-value business models that focus on the delivery of outcomes rather than products to customers (DEAS NetworkPlus, 2020). Advance Service offers can be challenging to communicate and limit businesses understanding in the value and benefits. This can be costly both for customers and service providers. This has initiated researchers to explore innovative digital technologies to enhance the communication, education and engagement of customers about DEAS offers (DEAS NetworkPlus, 2019). This work employed Serious Games as an innovative technology to research if DEAS offers can be communicated to current and future customers, whilst engaging and educating them about the DEAS benefits. Thus, this project was developed in collaboration with the Howden Group which are a global engineering business who focuses on providing their clients with industrial air and gas handling assets (Howden Group, 2021). Howden provided their DEAS “service agreement” offer, as an industry example. This offer was split into services and benefits, recommended to the player as controls, perks and upgrades in the game. The game simulation challenges the users with random equipment malfunctions, forcing them to select appropriate DEAS solutions and learn in a chaos-based scenario.