The analysis in Chen, Kaya and Özer (2006) (henceforth, “the paper”) assumes that the manufacturer already has dual sales channels: a direct online channel, and an independent bricks-and-mortar retail channel. In this section, we study two single channel scenarios, and compare their results with the dual channel scenario results of the paper. First, we consider a manufacturer who sells only thr...

Prior studies on performance-based contracting (PBC) for after-sales services have highlighted its advantages over traditional resource-based contracting (RBC), when products are established and their reliability is known to all parties. We develop a game theoretic model to investigate how these insights are affected when the vendor is privately informed about the reliability of a newly develop...

This paper reflects our findings on the technological feasibility of a mobile service scenario. We will show that despite the scenario being quite ordinary for endusers, the required service support functionality is rather complex. The realisation hinges on intricate grounded contextual reasoning about location information, user profiles and other situational context information. In particular,...

Purpose – Customer relationship management (CRM) is an information system that tracks customers’ interactions with the firm and allows employees to instantly pull up information about the customers such as past sales, service records, outstanding records and unresolved problem calls. This paper aims to put forward strategies for successful implementation of CRM and discusses barriers to CRM in ...

An understanding by support organisations of the key factors enabling successful enterprise after-sales customer support provision when using Web-based Selfservice Systems (WSSs) is essential to making improvements in such systems. This paper reports key stakeholder-oriented findings from an interpretive study of critical success factors (CSFs) for the transfer of after-sales support-oriented k...

In recent years, the Cloud Computing paradigm has proven effective in scaling dynamically the number of servers according to simple performance metrics and the incoming workload. However while some applications are able to scale-out, as current scaling metrics do not relate system performance to sales, hosting costs and profits are not optimized completely. The following article proposes a nove...

Fourty-two village animal health workers called keymen (KM) and 84 veterinary assistants (VA) involved in a Basic Animal Health Service (BAHS) Programme in northern Malawi were interviewed during 1998. The general characteristics and perceptions of both groups were analysed using uni- and multivariate techniques. Detailed sales and treatment patterns of six KM and 12 VA were evaluated for the p...