As user-centric innovation has recently emerged as a successful way of developing new products, services, and concepts, it is worth considering the perspectives of potential technology users during R&D project selection processes. Nevertheless, little effort has been made to reflect customer-perceived value in establishing selection criteria, with the focus mainly on technological potential ins...

At many firms, incentivized salespeople with private information about customers are responsible for CRM. While incentives motivate sales performance, private information can induce moral hazard by salespeople to gain compensation at the expense of the firm. We investigate the sales performance--moral hazard tradeoff in response to multidimensional performance (acquisition and maintenance) ince...

A product (e.g. automobile, computer) can be configured using different combinations of its available attributes (features). However, selection of attributes may not be independent of the selection of other attributes. In practice, each attribute implies a selection rule (dependency) for other sets of attributes in order to generate a valid configuration. Due to dynamic changes in the product d...

Clients are the vital artery of every industry and business. Maintaining these customers is one of the most important tasks of any business, especially banks.  The  specific needs  of  customers and  the increasing compe- tition in the banking services market have led banks to create structures that can respond flexibly to these needs. Obviously, one of the important points is that moving to th...

Clients are the vital artery of every industry and business. Maintaining these customers is one of the most important tasks of any business, especially banks.  The  specific needs  of  customers and  the increasing compe- tition in the banking services market have led banks to create structures that can respond flexibly to these needs. Obviously, one of the important points is that moving to th...

The profit resulting from customer relationship is essential to ensure companies viability, so an improvement in customer retention is crucial for competitiveness. As such, companies have recognized the importance of customer centered strategies and consequently customer relationship management (CRM) is often at the core of their strategic plans. In this context, a priori knowledge about the ri...

Current product-oriented database search facilities are widely used on the Internet but recognized as limited in capability for intelligent sales support. The vision of intelligent knowledgeable virtual sales agents is to incorporate more knowledge about products, customers, and the sales process into an electronic shop. This chapter describes a knowledge-based technology called case-based reas...

Within analytical customer relationship management (CRM), customer acquisition models suffer the most from a lack of data quality because the information of potential customers is mostly limited to socio-demographic and lifestyle variables obtained from external data vendors. Particularly in this situation, taking advantage of the spatial correlation between customers can improve the predictive...

Electronic government is attested to have the potential to shape public administrations to be more customer oriented. In order to be customer oriented, municipalities need knowledge about customer needs. Which municipalities explore customer needs and what do they change is investigated using data of a nationwide survey about e-government in Switzerland. Results show big differences in explorin...