Trust and mobile among digital communities
Trust
In the new era of digital environment, collaborative consumption and sharing economy among digital communities, seem to be a research phenomenon on an anthropological and sociological basis.
Trust through applications and platforms, has been obvious since the number of users is increasing daily. But how each platform or app build and maintain the trust?
Our university team proceeded with a research through participant observation method, on the platform of Incrediblue. On this vacation platform there are three communities (users, skippers, boat owners) and the company. To be able to collaborate with each other, trust is a key element. Starting with the company we found that they built trust by checking the quality of the services skippers are providing to their clients and the equipment and status of the boats they cooperate with. They are up to date at their social media contacts and they response fast to users. The excellence of customers care was profound by the tense period of the capital controls during the summer (2015), in which although there was a decrease on reservations, all clients that had already booked were completely calm down and satisfied with the department’s handling.
As for the skippers and boat owners the matter of trust gets a little bit harder. Among others there are boat owners that wouldn’t trust their boat on another skipper or vise versa, a skipper may not choose to ship with an other boat in order to avoid the responsibility to cause any damage to a stranger’s boat. Although this is not a common phenomenon, it happens.
Mobile/Mobility
Mobile use is a wide session and it has entered most of our actions, but there are some things that we need to do our research with caution and relaxed at home by our Pc. Such a research is for our vacations, so Incrediblue platform is mostly use by PC with an exemption of 30% of users that reach the platform by mobile phone or tablet. On the other hand for boat owners and skippers we found that it would be useful to check their reservation or their requests from their mobile phone, as they are always on the run. That seems to be the next goal for the founders of Incrediblue. A mobile application for the skippers and boat owners.
You can check other key factors and findings of this research on the follow links:
