The rise of Internet commerce led to multiple predictions of disintermediation and the decline of physical shopping. However, a "click and mortar" approach, which combines online, offline and telephone contact, has added value for customers and for supplier profitability, as recent research confirms.

Our research objective was to help organizations design Internet services for a multi-channel context.

We compared several existing (service) design methods, and combined them into the "Multi-channel QFD" (MuCh-QFD) method, which was tested for effectiveness in a structured field experiment. The method consists of a standardized intake and a service definition session of four hours with multiple stakeholders. We developed a control group session with an alternative design approach: "Fundamental Engineering" (FE). The performance of both sessions is compared on: customer orientation, channel coherence, channel synergy, competitive positioning, process progression, process focus and stakeholder communication.

The main conclusion is that MuCh-QFD sessions perform significantly better than FE sessions on customer orientation (p<0.001), channel coherence (p=0.01) and communication between stakeholder perspectives like sales, service, marketing, ICT and processes (p<0.001).

The value of MuCh-QFD is: starting from customer priorities, explicitly connecting them to service functionality priorities, incorporating multi-channel customer needs and functions, connecting stakeholder perspectives and aiding the communication of design decisions after sessions.

Finally, the field experiment illustrates a promising paradigm for developing and testing design methods via standardized half-day sessions.