background & purpose: in the health sector, in addition to the important consequence of treatment, health system should meet the expectations regarding the desirability of services. expectations and perceptions of patients about the desirability of services play an important role in selecting hospitals, their loyalty to the organization & replanning to purchase. thus the present study has been ...

In recent years, marine cultural tourism, an emerging tourism mode, has become more and more popular among tourists, and demonstrates broad market prospects. However, Chinese marine cultural tourism is still in the development and growth stage, and the level of customer satisfaction is uneven. The improvement of the customer satisfaction level is conducive to meeting customers’ demands in marin...

Customer integration has many recognised advantages, but also entails negative side effects that may impair the success of innovative activities. These negative side effects have not yet been sufficiently investigated. Whereas some may occur within the entire early innovation phase, others are likely to affect only few sub-phases. Each sub-phase, defined in a slightly new way as compared with e...

Excerpt] Scheduling front-line service providers is a constant challenge for hospitality managers, given the inevitable tradeoff between service standards and operating expense. Traditional employee scheduling typically applies a cost-minimization approach to specify the level of front-line service providers who will be available to meet periodic demand. That cost includes the opportunity cost ...

The ability to retain and lock-in customers in the face of competition is a major concern for e-commerce businesses, especially those that invest heavily in advertising and customer acquisition. In this paper, we propose a method for measuring the magnitude of switching costs and brand loyalty for on-line service providers based on the random utility modeling framework. Applying this approach t...

As a customer-driven product development methodology, quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely used methodology to translate customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) to achieve higher product performance and customer satisfaction. Product planning house of quality is of fundamental and strategic importance in the QFD system. Each customer has different preferences...

There has been little research on how market disruptions affect customer–brand relationships and how firms can sustain brand loyalty when disruptions occur. Drawing from social identity theory and the brand loyalty literature, the authors propose a conceptual framework to examine these issues in a specific market disruption, namely, the introduction of a radically new brand.The framework focuse...

Upselling is a common practice in business that is associated with high profit margin. Yet empirical evidence suggests that upselling is negatively correlated with customer satisfaction. In this paper, we study the relationship between upselling and customer satisfaction in the framework of sales agents’ incentive. On the one hand, sales representatives are motivated to upsell by the monetary i...

Bike-sharing has seen great development during recent years, both in Europe and globally. However, these systems are far from perfect. The uncertainty of the customer demand often leads to an unbalanced distribution of bicycles over the time and space (congestion and/or starvation), resulting both in a loss of customers and a poor customer experience. In order to improve those aspects, we propo...