'Local' is an asset, response time is key: Lessons learned from the amiona St. Gallen local digital marketplace

Abstract

The Amiona digital marketplace allows citizens of St. Gallen, a city of 75,000 people in eastern Switzerland, to make appointments 24/7 with quality-assured, trustworthy local service providers, as well as to provide informal support to neighbours and coordinate local events. The lessons learned reveal the benefits of a local service marketplace for both consumer and provider, highlight the criticality of response time for user acceptance and ensure additional improvements. Iterative enhancements of the platform based on these learnings from daily operation have already resulted in a ready-to-use standard software solution for digital marketplaces that addresses the varying needs of users with highly diverse levels of digitisation, in particular by supporting three different processes for appointment coordination - also allowing those with paperbased agendas to participate - in combination with a variety of notification channels to shorten response time.