The value of e-banking services in the Egyptian environment : an integrated model

Introduction: Driving the introduction of e-banking services in Egypt are structural changes, which have intensified competition across the banking sector. The value (net benefits) of e-banking services to their suppliers lies in their ability to attract new customers and retain those interested in using them. To achieve these objectives, requires an understanding of the value management process in e-banking services specifically within the Egyptian environment.Study Problem: Extant literature lacks an integrated model of value management relevant to the e-banking services. Empirical studies addressing the value of e-banking services in terms of antecedents and consequence in general and in the Egyptian environment are limited. Moreover, customer relationship management (CRM) literature disagrees on the factors reflecting the role of the internal operating environment and overlooks the role of the external environment in affecting the ability of service suppliers to create and deliver the value of e-banking services.Aim and objectives: This study sought to develop an integrated model for managing the value of e-banking services in the Egyptian environment through the following objectives. First, to identify the antecedents (requirements) and consequence of e-banking services perceived value from the demand side of e-banking services. Second, to explore factors shaping banks' ability to create and deliver value of offered e-banking services.Paradigm and research methods: This study adopted the critical realism paradigm, an anti-positivist paradigm, which supports the exploratory and the abductive nature of this research. To identify the antecedents and consequence of e-banking services perceived value from the demand side of e-banking services, an exploratory sequential strategy, in which in-depth interviews preceded the survey phase, was conducted. To explore factors shaping the banks' ability to create and deliver the value of e-banking services, semi-structured interviews were used.Key Findings: Findings related to the demand side indicated that improving e-banking services perceived value can significantly and positively strengthen the relationship between banks and customers. Antecedents of value were identified to be a combination of the explicit involvement of service suppliers in supporting face-to-face service encounters, e-banking services quality, and the role of external environment in promoting e-banking services.The ability of banks to create and deliver value of e-banking services is affected by their positioning strategy, bank branch design, employment scheme, criteria of recruiting front-office employees, and criteria of evaluating front-office employees' performance. The nature of the Egyptian economy, output of education system and legal system development were defined as highly influential within this process.Conclusion: It could be concluded that, managing the value of e-banking services is a dynamic process between service users and service suppliers

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

A conceptual framework for the direct marketing process using business intelligence

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Direct marketing is becoming a key strategy for organisations to develop and maintain strong customer relationships. This method targets specific customers with personalised advertising and promotional campaigns in order to help organisations increase campaign responses and to get a higher return on their investments. There are, however, many issues related to direct marketing, ranging from the highly technical to the more organisational and managerial aspects. This research focuses on the organisational and managerial issues of the direct marketing process and investigates the stages, activities and technologies required to effectively execute direct marketing. The direct marketing process integrates a complex collection of marketing concepts and business analytics principles, which form an entirely ‘self-contained’ choice for organisations. This makes direct marketing a significantly difficult process to perform. As a result, many scholars have attempted to tackle the complexity of executing the direct marketing process. However, most of their research efforts did not consider an integrated information system platform capable of effectively supporting the direct marketing process. This research attempts to address the above issues by developing a conceptual framework for the Direct Marketing Process with Business Intelligence (DMP-BI). The conceptual framework is developed using the identified marketing concepts and business analytics principles for the direct marketing process. It also proposes Business Intelligence (BI) as an integrated information system platform to effectively execute the direct marketing process. In order to evaluate and illustrate the practicality and impact of the DMP-BI framework, this thesis adopts a case study approach. Three case studies have been carried out in different industries including retailing, telecommunication and higher education. The aim of the case studies is also to demonstrate the usage of the DMP-BI framework within an organisational context. Based on the case studies’ findings, this thesis compares the DMP-BI framework with existing rival methodologies. The comparisons provide clear indications of the DMP-BI framework’s benefits over existing rival methodologies

E-CRM and relationship quality : exploratory research in the portuguese banking sector

Mestrado em MarketingO desenvolvimento da Gestão Eletrónica do Relacionamento com o Cliente (E-CRM) obrigou as empresas, em especial os bancos, a re-avaliarem como, quando e em que extensão deverão interagir com os seus clientes. Com o advento da internet, os clientes tornaram-se mais sofisticados e focados no seu relacionamento com o sector bancário. Nesse sentido, efetuou-se um estudo exploratório, com o objetivo de compreender e avaliar os resultados da implementação do E-CRM. Efetuou-se uma revisão de literatura e desenvolveu-se um conceito chamado "Atributos de Serviços Baseados no Cliente" para medir os resultados na perspectiva do cliente, utilizando para o efeito a frequência de utilização que fazem do seu serviço de homebanking. Para esse efeito, foi desenvolvido e combinado um modelo de atributo de serviço com um modelo de relação de qualidade. De acordo com os resultados apurados são fornecidos indícios para análises futuras.The development of Electronic Customer Relationship Management (E-CRM) has forced companies, especially banks, to re-evaluate how, when and to what extent they should interact with their customers. With the advent of the internet, customers have become more sophisticated and focused on their relationship with the banking sector. In this sense, an exploratory study was performed in order to understand and evaluate the results of the existence of E-CRM. Through a literature review a concept called "Customer Based Service Attribute" has been developed to measure these outcomes from the perspective of customers, through the frequency of their electronic banking usage. A model of service attribute and a model of Relationship Quality and Outcomes were developed and combined. Results obtained are presented for further analysis

Agent based modelling and simulation: An examination of customer retention in the UK mobile market

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Customer retention is an important issue for any business, especially in mature markets such as the UK mobile market where new customers can only be acquired from competitors. Different methods and techniques have been used to investigate customer retention including statistical methods and data mining. However, due to the increasing complexity of the mobile market, the effectiveness of these techniques is questionable. This study proposes Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) as a novel approach to investigate customer retention. ABMS is an emerging means of simulating behaviour and examining behavioural consequences. In outline, agents represent customers and agent relationships represent processes of agent interaction. This study follows the design science paradigm to build and evaluate a generic, reusable, agent-based (CubSim) model to examine the factors affecting customer retention based on data extracted from a UK mobile operator. Based on these data, two data mining models are built to gain a better understanding of the problem domain and to identify the main limitations of data mining. This is followed by two interrelated development cycles: (1) Build the CubSim model, starting with modelling customer interaction with the market, including interaction with the service provider and other competing operators in the market; and (2) Extend the CubSim model by incorporating interaction among customers. The key contribution of this study lies in using ABMS to identify and model the key factors that affect customer retention simultaneously and jointly. In this manner, the CubSim model is better suited to account for the dynamics of customer churn behaviour in the UK mobile market than all other existing models. Another important contribution of this study is that it provides an empirical, actionable insight on customer retention. In particular, and most interestingly, the experimental results show that applying a mixed customer retention strategy targeting both high value customers and customers with a large personal network outperforms the traditional customer retention strategies, which focuses only on the customer‘s value.This work is funded by the Brunel Department of Information Systems and Computing (DISC

Drivers and performance outcomes of effective use of business intelligence (BI) system for managing customer relationships : A multiple case study in business-to-business sector

The era of big data has heralded and ushered in a new way of doing business and new waves of business activities. The increasing amount of data has called for new ways of managing customer relationships according to customer needs and preferences in order to increase customer value and satisfaction. These days, customers are better positioned to make in-formed decisions due to the huge amount of information readily available on the internet and other platforms. Staying ahead of the competition requires taking proactive actions and making strategic and well-informed decisions through insights gained from customer data. This can be facilitated through use of business intelligence (BI) system. While the impact of the use of BI system on firm performance has received relatively little attention, the factors that drive the effective use of BI system for managing customer relationship have received no attention. This is a first of its kind study to investigate the drivers of the effective use of BI system at two levels. Drawing on the theory of effective use and the business process per-formance framework, this study develops a theoretical framework on the determinants and performance outcomes of the effective use of BI system for managing customer relation-ships. Data was collected from 4 different companies (2 MNEs and 2 SMEs) using a multiple case study methodology. The findings reveal that organizational level determinants such as top management support and commitment, well defined goals and vision, organizational culture, BI capabilities and training drive the effective use of BI system in managing customer relationships. At the user level, the findings reveal that employee commitment, soft skills, self-efficacy drive the effective use of BI system for managing customer relationships. Fur-ther, effectively using the BI system leads to increased sales, enhanced product innovation, reduced cost, improved customer relationship, increased learning, and improved decision making. This study contributes to the understanding of how businesses can effectively use the BI system to improve business process performance in order to attain their business goals

Three dimensional modelling of customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty for measuring quality of service

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The aim of this thesis is to propose a model that explains the relationship between customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty based on service quality attributes. The three elements of satisfaction, retention and loyalty towards products represent ongoing challenges for the corporate financial performance. Customer behaviour analysis (known as business intelligence or customer relationship management or customer experience management) has become a major factor in the corporate decision making and strategic planning processes. Prevailing logic dictates that by improving service attributes one should expect better customer satisfaction levels. Consequently, improved satisfaction levels should increase the probability of customer retention and degree of loyalty. Substantial research work has been dedicated to explain the importance of customer behaviour measurement for industry. However, there is little evidence that there has been an overall integrating empirical research that relates the three elements of satisfaction, retention and loyalty with respect to service quality attributes. Empirical data collected from the UK mobile telecommunication for this research shows that such an objective model that is capable of capturing this three dimensional relationship will contribute towards more robust decision making and better strategic planning. The proposed thesis extracts the data about key service attributes from a combination of literature review, surveys, and interviews from the UK mobile telecommunication industry. Responses were analysed using multiple regression, regression analysis with dummy variables, logistic regression, logistic regression with dummy variables and structural equation modelling (SEM) to test variables and their interrelationships. This study makes a step forward and contributes to the body of knowledge as it: (a) highlights the role of service attribute performance towards customer satisfaction, consequently identifies attributes that affect satisfaction and dissatisfaction of customers, (b) maps the relationship between attribute importance and attribute performance, (c) optimise resource allocation process using importance-performance analysis (IPA), (d) classifies customers with respect to the role and length of relationship they have with the company (switching probability), and (e) describes the interrelationship between customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty. The novelty of the research lies in: (a) establishment of a framework that links service attribute performance to customer satisfaction and then to customer future intentions (customer retention and customer loyalty), and (b) provision of a model that could assist key decision makers in prudent usage of resources for maximum profitability. This dissertation presents a novel approach methodology and modelling construct for customer behaviour analysis. For proof of concept it presents a case study in the mobile telecommunication industry. It is worth noting that in this research work Customer Retention is interpreted as probability of switching between service providers. Customer Loyalty is interpreted as referral (word-of-mouth) activity by existing customers

The role of people in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) eco-system within South African private banks : an internal stakeholder perspective

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Wits Business School, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg South Africa. In fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Management in Strategic MarketingPurpose: Private Banks are constantly seeking ways to build strong relationships with their most profitable customers. Despite this, there is limited research on CRM in the private banking industry of South Africa. The study assesses the role of internal stakeholders in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) eco-system within South African in private banks. Design/Methodology/Approach: Drawing on the stakeholder and the resource based theories, the researcher conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with a purposive sample of 20 research participants across the four leading private banks in South Africa. Findings: The research findings from the sample of 20 participants suggest that a highly skilled and experienced workforce is a primary driver of effective CRM implementation. Objectives and goals of the CRM eco-system have to be clear and employees need to be incentivised and motivated. Recommendations: Private banks need to continuously up-skill and retain experience employees in order to achieve high CRM objectives. Private banks need to have clear objectives and goals of implementing the CRM eco-system and employees need to be motivated and rewarded fairly for their contribution in successfully implementing the CRM eco-system. Implications: The internal stakeholders need to possess exceptional relationship management skills; have the ability to realise the importance of share of wallet; employ a customer-centric marketing approach; most importantly have a minimum experience of five years within the personal relationship banking industry. Key words and phrases: Customer Relationship Management (CRM), internal stakeholder, stakeholder theory, private banks, resource based view (RBV)GR201