This technical support center is vital to Macrohard’s business strategy, since it has a significant impact on customers’ experience with their products. To ensure that this experience is positive, technicians must provide accurate information and helpful support. From Macrohard’s perspective, this is a matter of ensuring that the technician has the right skill and training. But for customers to...

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy to select and manage the most valuable customer relationships. CRM requires a customer-centric business philosophy and culture to support effective marketing, sales, and service processes. CRM applications can enable effective customer relationship management, provided that an enterprise has the right leadership, strategy, and cultur...

Supply Chain Management (SCM) deals with the management of flows of goods, information and funds within and between supply chain partners in order to satisfy consumer needs in the most efficient way (Chopra & Meindl 2007, Christopher 1998). Along a supply chain, various decisions have to be made continuously, from the simple choice, which customer order to be processed next, to the serious ques...

Rising external competition and cost-pressures compel internal service providers to re-define their customerservice approach. Providing value propositions to the intra-firm end-users instead of provisioning technical resources becomes a necessity to facilitate transparency in costs and customer satisfaction. With that, the complexity of IT projects, particularly international ones, rises and ch...

The core issues of mass customization (MC) are to provide more and more conveniences to meet customer’s customized requirements and to ensure near mass production efficiency and quality in manufacturing processes. Since the MC provides to the customer, in the footwear sector, the possibility to choose shoes with different materials, colours, sizes and performances, the shops need big stocks in ...

Based on accepted advances in the marketing, economics, consumer behavior, and satisfaction literatures, we develop a micro-foundations model of a firm that needs to manage the quality of a product that is inherently heterogeneous in the presence of varying customer tastes or expectations for quality. Our model blends elements of the returns to quality, customer lifetime value, and service prof...

In the midst of the digital revolution, the telecommunications industry is undergoing major changes. One of the changes affecting telcos is the increase in data sources from which to get customer feedback – big data, social media. Where this used to be fully controlled by companies through their call centres, websites and shops, today much feedback is expressed in social media, blogs, news site...

Tourism in Africa is growing at a faster rate than other regions of the world, and consumers increasingly access tourism bureau websites to gather information about travel destinations. The purpose of this study is to evaluate tourism bureau websites for 20 major cities and 30 countries in Africa on six dimensions: Convenience, Cost, Choice, Customer Service, Customization and Coordination. Sig...