Methods for focusing on customer orientation in the early phases in the innovation process.

A constant flow of innovative products which meets the needs of customers and therefore is a monetary success for the inventing organization is important for the long term success of organizations, especially in modem dynamic markets. As resources for innovation projects in organizations are generally limited it is important to choose the right ideas which are followed and later brought to the market. Therefore it is important to integrate external people at the beginning of the innovation process. The following methods all meet this requirement: Models for Positioning compare different attributes of existing or potential products or applications, the Empathic Design Method observes customers using existing products to gain information about future products and the Lead User Approach generates mainly radical innovations by bringing together test persons with very different backgrounds. The developed recommendation matrix based on innovation motives of an organization (e.g. degree of novelty, time frames, change of markets, etc.) and provides recommendations for the selection of a method. As a result, this matrix in combination with other developed factors of differentiation (e.g. complexity of method, availability of resources, etc.) provides a decision guideline for an organization

Customer retention and cross-buying in premium banking services : the roles of switching costs and interaction quality

The emergence of e-banking and intense competition in premium banking services have essentially evolved the way banks have conventionally conducted their business and the way customers interact with banks. Consequently, banks are increasingly confronted with the conundrum: customers may appreciate the convenience of e-banking but as they migrate away from conventional banking mediums, the extent of personal interaction with bank staff –and in the case of premium banking services their Relationship Managers –decreases as do switching costs and, ultimately, long-term customer commitment.While the constructs of commitment and trust have been widely applied in relationship marketing studies, there is a need for a more comprehensive model and more objective measurement of continuance commitment. In response, based on payment equity theory and social exchange theory, as well as logical arguments from previous research, this thesis extends Morgan and Hunt’s (1994) commitment–trust model into a single model that encompasses moderating effects such as switching costs and interaction quality as well as continuance commitment in the form of retention and cross-buying. It is important to study customer retention and cross-buying simultaneously, as they have been studied separately in previous research. The purpose of the study is thus to examine the roles of switching costs and interaction quality along with other key relational variables that influence customer retention and cross-buying behaviour in the premium banking services sector.Primary data for the study were collected from 525 bank customers in a large metropolitan area in Australia. The study identifies the importance of switching costs and interaction quality and their relationship with trust, reputation and expertise for continuance commitment (retention and cross-buying). Regression analysis and MANOVA were used to test the hypotheses. The analyses of the findings of this thesis provide support to the model and, in the main, support the hypotheses. The results confirm that while reputation and expertise have a positive impact on retention, they do not affect cross-buying. Only trust has a positive impact on both retention and cross-buying. To further investigate the roles of switching costs and interaction quality, investigation was carried out to examine if these two constructs moderate the relationship between trust and continuance commitment (retention and cross-buying). The results confirm that although switching costs have no impact on retention, they do affect cross-buying. Conversely, interaction quality has a positive impact on retention, but no effect on cross-buying. Hence, it can be concluded that customer retention is not necessarily translated into cross-buying.Primary data for the study were collected from 525 bank customers in a large metropolitan area in Australia. The study identifies the importance of switching costs and interaction quality and their relationship with trust, reputation and expertise for continuance commitment (retention and cross-buying). Regression analysis and MANOVA were used to test the hypotheses. The analyses of the findings of this thesis provide support to the model and, in the main, support the hypotheses. The results confirm that while reputation and expertise have a positive impact on retention, they do not affect cross-buying. Only trust has a positive impact on both retention and cross-buying. To further investigate the roles of switching costs and interaction quality, investigation was carried out to examine if these two constructs moderate the relationship between trust and continuance commitment (retention and cross-buying). The results confirm that although switching costs have no impact on retention, they do affect cross-buying. Conversely, interaction quality has a positive impact on retention, but no effect on cross-buying. Hence, it can be concluded that customer retention is not necessarily translated into cross-buying

Examining the antecedents and structure of customer loyalty in a tourism context

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the structure and antecedents of cruise passengers' loyalty. Specifically, the study examined the dimensionality of the loyalty construct. Moreover, the study investigated the utility of applying the Investment Model (Rusbult 1980, 1983) to reveal the psychological processes underlying loyalty formation. The study also attempted to, guided by the Investment Model, integrate the seemingly segregated findings of loyalty antecedents from marketing and leisure/tourism literature. Based on the Investment Model and other marketing and leisure/tourism studies on loyalty, a conceptual framework was established for this study. An online panel survey was conducted to examine this model. Subjects (N = 554) were online panelists who were repeat cruisers and who have cruised at least once in the past 12 months. In this study, loyalty was conceptualized as a four-dimensional construct: cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, conative loyalty, and behavioral loyalty. Further, the first three components were postulated as three subdimensions of a higher order construct, attitudinal loyalty. However, this conceptualization was not supported by the data. Alternatively, post-hoc analyses revealed that attitudinal loyalty was a first-order one-dimensional construct, containing cognitve, affective, and conative components. Moreover, behavioral loyalty was positively and significantly influenced by attitudinal loyalty. In sum, this study supported the traditional two-dimensional conceptualization of loyalty, which argues that loyalty has an attitudinal and a behavioral component. Following the Investment Model, this dissertation suggested that satisfaction, quality of alternatives, and investment size were three critical antecedents of consumers' attitudinal loyalty. These theoretical relationships were supported by the present study, and collectively, the three predictors accounted for over 74 percent of the variance in attitudinal loyalty. Finally, this dissertation hypothesized that quality and value, two constructs related to loyalty, served as antecedents of satisfaction, with quality also leading to value. Results of the study supported all these hypotheses, and satisfaction was found to partially mediate the quality-attitudinal loyalty, and value-attitudinal loyalty relationships. Results of the present study provide important direction for the development of a holistic theoretical framework to explain the formation and structure of customers' brand loyalty

A Framework for Enhancing Project Quality and Customer Satisfaction In Government Road Construction Projects In Rivers State, Nigeria

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophySatisfaction has consistently been a source of concern to clients, stakeholders and customers in the construction industry globally. In Nigeria, despite the huge financial investments in construction and its associated economic benefits, construction projects are characterized by poor quality in aesthetics, high costs in maintenance and failure to meet or exceed the customers’ quality expectations. An even greater challenge is faced when considering government construction projects as re- occurring issues like on time delivery, operational and aesthetic excellence and even project abandonment continue to resurface. Although previous studies have developed models and frameworks to improve customer satisfaction in product and service organisations, researchers have not treated in detail issues involving customer satisfaction within projects which do not have profits and financial gains as the driving force such as government construction projects. The aim of this research was to develop a framework that would identify particular areas associated with project quality where adequate resources could be channelled in order to enhance customer satisfaction in government road construction projects in Rivers State, Nigeria. Sequel to an extensive literature review, a conceptual framework was developed to establish the relationship between three attributes of project quality namely performance, reliability and aesthetics and two attributes of customer satisfaction measured through contractor re-patronage and referral. 503 road construction practitioners within the Port Harcourt metropolis of Rivers State, Nigeria participated in a quantitative survey and data obtained was subjected to stepwise multiple regression analysis. The results showed that a strong, positive and significant relationship existed between the attributes of project quality and customer satisfaction with project quality explaining 54.8% of the variance in contractor re-patronage and 61.8% of the variance in contractor referral. Performance was however found to have the greatest effect on contractor re-patronage (R2=.550, adjusted R2=.548) while aesthetics had the highest effect on contractor referral (R2=.572, adjusted R2= .571). Reliability was found to have the weakest effect on customer satisfaction and could be attributed to its civil and structural Engineering links which are either unknown or invisible to the customer. 10 structured interviews with construction professionals were used to validate the developed framework and justify the research design. The findings support the framework and suggest that the knowledge and analysis of the construction costs, the use of competent professional experts, the provision of a revised legal framework for road construction, delegation of responsibility for road maintenance, avoidance of project abandonment, identifying and mitigating construction risks, adopting a strategy for project monitoring, enforcing health and safety considerations, provision of innovative excitement factors as well as post project evaluations were essential for enhancing project quality and customer satisfaction from government road construction projects. The study advocates for an adoption of the framework and concludes by making recommendations including the incorporation of government and private construction practitioners and further identifies areas for future study

A study of visitor satisfaction in tourism enterprises

Satisfying customers is fundamental to the marketing concept and has long been recognised as important, firstly in the economic discipline and subsequently in marketing and in business generally. In a competitive marketplace customer satisfaction is closely linked to the ability of the organisation to deliver quality. Therefore, organisations rely on the feedback received from customers about how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with product and service provision and their perceptions of the value received. The study examines the various product and service attributes that contribute to visitor satisfaction and experience, and evaluates the role of price-value perceptions and behavioural intentions. This examination was undertaken by the study of three tourism enterprises operating in the heritage tourism area. These included Sovereign Hill, which is an historic goldfields township; Brambuk, which is an indigenous cultural centre located in the Grampians in Western Victoria; and Werribee Mansion, which depicts the life of a wealthy farming family in the early periods in Victoria. This study has provided insight into the understanding of visitor satisfaction in tourism enterprises by evaluating the relationship between overall satisfaction and dissatisfaction and how these influence revisit and recommending behaviour, as well as the influence of price-value perceptions on satisfaction, experience and enjoyment. The study shows that price-value dissatisfaction impacts negatively on the willingness of visitors to recommend a tourism venue to others and that price dissatisfaction tends to impact negatively on satisfaction. The results provide some insight into what contributes to tourist satisfaction, enjoyment and experience. The findings are expected to assist strategic and operational managers in their quest for continued quality enhancement and the provision and renewal of tourism products and services. It is expected that the findings will provide some guidance to managers, tourism operators, marketers and researchers alike in developing well informed data and analyses that are the key to strategic and competitive advantage.Doctor of Business Adminstratio

Manager’s and citizen’s perspective of positive and negative risks for small probabilities

So far „risk‟ has been mostly defined as the expected value of a loss, mathematically PL, being P the probability of an adverse event and L the loss incurred as a consequence of the event. The so called risk matrix is based on this definition. Also for favorable events one usually refers to the expected gain PG, being G the gain incurred as a consequence of the positive event. These “measures” are generally violated in practice. The case of insurances (on the side of losses, negative risk) and the case of lotteries (on the side of gains, positive risk) are the most obvious. In these cases a single person is available to pay a higher price than that stated by the mathematical expected value, according to (more or less theoretically justified) measures. The higher the risk, the higher the unfair accepted price. The definition of risk as expected value is justified in a long term “manager‟s” perspective, in which it is conceivable to distribute the effects of an adverse event on a large number of subjects or a large number of recurrences. In other words, this definition is mostly justified on frequentist terms. Moreover, according to this definition, in two extreme situations (high-probability/low-consequence and low-probability/high-consequence), the estimated risk is low. This logic is against the principles of sustainability and continuous improvement, which should impose instead both a continuous search for lower probabilities of adverse events (higher and higher reliability) and a continuous search for lower impact of adverse events (in accordance with the fail-safe principle). In this work a different definition of risk is proposed, which stems from the idea of safeguard: (1Risk)=(1P)(1L). According to this definition, the risk levels can be considered low only when both the probability of the adverse event and the loss are small. Such perspective, in which the calculation of safeguard is privileged to the calculation of risk, would possibly avoid exposing the Society to catastrophic consequences, sometimes due to wrong or oversimplified use of probabilistic models. Therefore, it can be seen as the citizen‟s perspective to the definition of risk

Conceptualising private client behaviour within the professional service relationship

This study, which seeks to conceptualise client behaviours within the professional service relationship is located within the academic literature associated with relationship marketing. However, this study differs from the main characteristics of that literature in two ways. First, that literature focuses on the organisational benefits of retaining customers and empirical work to explore the benefits customer's receive is limited. This study, among clients of a professional service, provides a better understanding of why clients maintain relationships with solicitors and how their motives influence their behaviours within that relationship. Secondly, empirical studies are primarily focused within the business-to-business context and attempts to extend theory generated from that context into consumer markets have been criticised. The focus of this study is the private client perspective. Consequently, this thesis draws heavily on construct and theory development within the social exchange literature to explain the empirical findings and highlight limitations with the conceptual development and measurement of constructs with the relationship marketing literature. This thesis provides empirical support for the propositions that the presence of particular interaction variables will generate trust in the solicitor among private clients and that the presence of trust in the solicitor will result in private-client commitment to that relationship. Specific behaviours, exhibited by clients committed to the private client-solicitor relationship, are identified and suggestions made regarding client behaviours that emerge when private clients are not committed to the relationship. The thesis also critiques the way in which the trust and commitment constructs have been conceptualised and measured within the marketing discipline. An agenda is identified for future research to extend knowledge in four broad areas: the appropriateness of relationship marketing theory for the professional service context; conceptual and measurement scale development of constructs that underpin relationship marketing theory; differentiation of antecedents generating trust in, or reliance upon, professional services providers; and further understanding of private client behaviours within the professional services relationship