Suchergebnisse

In times of crisis, interactions and structures can change, eradicating prevailing norms and rules, with enduring unfavorable effects, and existing conceptual frameworks may fail to explain the effects of radical contextual change. In such contexts, the meaning of the customer experience is also likely to change, and touchpoints, cues, and the concept of the customer journey may prove insufficient to theorize the formation of those experiences. Adopting an agency-structure perspective, the article explores how crisis disrupts and alters structuration modalities, including space-time perception, access to resources, and institutional arrangements. To conceptualize how these contextual changes affect customer experience, we contend that it is necessary to understand the complex set of interactions among multiple actors and the structures and modalities that together shape the customer experience. Drawing on structuration theories to elucidate how disruptive contexts and crisis modalities affect the customer experience, the proposed conceptual framework identifies crisis modalities (discontinuities, accessibility, and fragmentability) that explain customer experiences in disruptive contexts as meaningful patterns of interaction informed by structure and agency. These findings can help firms to understand and manage customer experiences in disruptive contexts. In conclusion, we discuss how future research might contextualize and test the proposed framework.

'Communicating with Asia: Understanding People and Customs' by Harry Irwin is reviewed.

For more than a decade, marketing scholars in the field of service-dominant logic have discussed the ideas of customer value and value creation. An important element in customer value creation is the resources customers use in usage processes. A thorough investigation of these processes, however, is absent in the literature. The purposes of this article are to (1) provide a conceptual understanding of customer usage processes and (2) identify the dimensions for differentiating these processes. Building on an extensive literature review, we derive a conceptualization of customer usage processes and identify three dimensions to differentiate these processes, namely, actor intensity, interaction intensity, and resource intensity. We specify these dimensions further by using the repertory grid technique. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the nature of customer usage processes, the possibilities for differentiating them, and their relationship to the value creation process.

This comment is part of a symposium on Ekkehart Schlicht, On Custom in the Economy (1998)

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to conduct an exploratory study of potential business-to-business (B2B) customers that includes an empirical analysis that investigate the effect that customer entertainment has on customer suspicion toward the salesperson, and how those negative attitudes are influenced by the relationship stage and the perceived cost of the event.Design/methodology/approachUsing an experimental design, data were collected from 105 potential customers working in a B2B environment that assessed their attitudes regarding offers of varying levels of customer entertainment across differing stages of the relationship.FindingsResults demonstrate that B2B customers have important perceptions regarding the perceived cost of customer entertainment offers by salespeople. Those evaluations resulted in a positive relationship between customer attitudes of suspicion toward the salesperson and the perceived cost of the entertainment event. However, the stage of the relationship tended to ameliorate suspicious attitudes of customers, although not in a completely symmetrical manner.Research limitations/implicationsAdditional testing with larger sample populations would better solidify the existence of the relationships.Practical implicationsThis study provides a framework for practitioners that gives direction to the strategic use of customer entertainment such that it acts as a relationship catalyst, and not a relationship poison.Originality/valueThe paper uses a customer perspective to fill a need to better understand the instrumental role of customer entertainment in relationship marketing, and how it interacts with the perceived cost of the event and relationship stage to create differing customer attitudes.

This report was prepared for the incoming Minister of Trade and Industry in early 1990 just prior to Namibian independence. At that time Namibia was treated as part of South African territory by South Africa for the conduct of its international economic relations and was therefore automatically included in the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), albeit not as a sovereign member. However, with the certainty of independence the question of whether Namibia should formally accede to the SACU Agreement became an important factor in shaping its future trading relations. This document sets out the advantages and disadvantages of SACU membership for Namibia under the prevailing circumstances in early 1990. After due consideration the new government of Nambia decided to sign the SACU Agreement in June 1990. (DÜI-Hff)

Emergence of new products in chaotic markets and development of small and medium enterprises, (SME's) in national and international era has caused companies, factories and in general whole enterprises in private and also governmental and non-governmental organizations by different challenges which all have gone to bring new customers and also to keep previous ones who are accounted for their revenue. For this a new aspect of management science and mathematics as a basic and mother science shines to keep enterprise's efficiency in the current economical recession. The aim of this paper is analyzing the role of problem solving strategies in mathematics with Customer Relationship Management, CRM. This paper will be studying the logical relation between them.