269,899 research outputs found
Human Error Analysis to Customer Communication for Realtor Service Quality and The Implications to Personnel Training
The quality of customer service, especially in realtor service, is centered at customer contact and communication. Because of the inherent diversity in customer demands and the consequent service procedures, the analysis of the service errors or failures in customer communication from the human factors perspective may provide an effective alternative toward the quality improvement in customer services beside the SERVQUAL-based approaches. This study investigates the pattern of communication errors occurred in realtor service operations and the associated latent failures for the implications to personnel training for quality services. Customers with realtor service experiences were interviewed to provide detailed description regarding the communication error(s) encountered while dealt with realtors in the past. Among all types of communication errors in realtor services, it is found that the active errors on providing insufficient or incorrect information regarding the target real estates and the communication errors involved in the price negotiation processes are prominent. The analysis of latent failures further reveals the importance on process transparency and the role of the information systems. For modern C2C service settings like realtors, it is recommended that a double customer framework with the emphasis of support information system should be considered for communication error analysis. Implications and suggestions to personnel training for quality improvement in realtor customer service, in terms of system knowledge and process management, are discussed in details
Training needs for women-owned SMEs in England
Originality/value â The study offers original primary research into the contributory growth factors for women-owned enterprises in a representative area of Britain, identifies key issues, maps survival and success factors, and assesses women entrepreneurs' training needs and preferences.Purpose â The purpose of this research is to investigate the needs and preferences for training among growth-oriented women-owned SMEs in the East of England.
Design/methodology/approach â Quantitative data were collected through 108 on-line questionnaires, and the means analysed using SPSS. Qualitative data collected in response to open-ended questions were inductively analysed and interpreted.
Findings â Only one fourth of respondents received growth-oriented training in the previous two years, with an average duration of 3-5 days per year. Programmes most in demand concerned innovation and opportunity recognition, business evaluation and growth considerations, developing strategic customers and customers care, customer relationship management, as well as selling, networking and negotiation skills. High demand for these programmes corresponds to others results identifying contributory factors to higher enterprise performance and growth: product/service quality, new product/service development, appropriate marketing, effective use of websites, selling skills and informal networking.
Research limitations/implications â The scope of the project is limited to service sectors and sole proprietorships. Geographic scope is limited to the East of England. These limits nonetheless provide a reasonable base and rationale for the scope of the study.
Practical implications â With a better understanding of the capacity building requirements of women entrepreneurs in growth businesses, appropriately designed training programmes can be developed to help women achieve higher levels of entrepreneurial success
Multimedia Teleservices Modelled with the OSI Application Layer Structure
This paper looks into the communications capabilities that are required by distributed multimedia applications to achieve relation preserving information exchange. These capabilities are derived by analyzing the notion of information exchange and are embodied in communications functionalities. To emphasize the importance of the users' view, a top-down approach is applied. The (revised) OSI Application Layer Structure (OSI-ALS) is used to model the communications functionalities and to develop an architecture for composition of multimedia services with these functionalities. This work may therefore be considered an exercise to evaluate the suitability of OSI-ALS for composition of multimedia teleservices
Negotiating: Experiences of community nurses when contracting with clients
A community nurse is required to have excellent interpersonal, teaching, collaborative and clinical skills in order to develop effective individualised client care contracts. Using a descriptive qualitative design data was collected from two focus groups of fourteen community nurses to explore the issues surrounding negotiating and contracting client care contracts from the perspective of community nurses. Thematic analysis revealed three themes: âassessment of needsâ, âeducation towards enablementâ, and ânegotiationâ. âAssessment of needsâ identified that community nurses assess both the clientâs requirements for health care as well as the ability of the nurse to provide that care. âEducation towards enablementâ described that education of the client is a common strategy used by community nurses to establish realistic goals of health care as part of developing an ongoing care plan. The final theme, ânegotiationâ, involved an informed agreement between the client and the community nurse which forms the origin of the care contract that will direct the partnership between the client and the nurse. Of importance for community nurses is that development of successful person-centred care contracts requires skillful negotiation of care that strikes the balance between the needs of the client and the ability of the nurse to meet those needs
Health Care Opinion Leaders' Views on Transparency and Pricing
Presents survey results on healthcare experts' views on the importance of public access to clinical quality and price information, its role in improving health system performance, and various payment reforms and mechanisms to foster efficiency and value
Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks
MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes
equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to
communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each othersâ data
packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of
applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and
may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless
networks.
This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues
related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network
protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to
ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh
networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in
wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of
this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples,
however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not
restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability.
First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating
a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using
WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance
gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes
a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and
wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical
0. Abstract 3
function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation
further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process,
to bridge the applicationsâ service quality demands and the resource management,
while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation
among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal
operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to
the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question
of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data
ferries is investigated
An agent-based architecture for managing the provision of community care - the INCA (Intelligent Community Alarm) experience
Community Care is an area that requires extensive cooperation
between independent agencies, each of which needs to meet its own objectives and targets. None are engaged solely in the delivery of community care, and need to integrate the service with their other responsibilities in a coherent and efficient manner. Agent technology provides the means by which effective cooperation can take place without compromising the essential security of both the client and the
agencies involved as the appropriate set of responses can be generated through negotiation between the parties without the need for access to the main information repositories that would be necessary with conventional collaboration models. The autonomous nature of agents also means that a variety of agents can cooperate
together with various local capabilities, so long as they conform to the relevant messaging requirements. This allows a variety of agents, with capabilities tailored to the carers to which they are attached to be developed so that cost-effective solutions can be provided.
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Los Angeles Labor Negotiations Study
[Excerpt] Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting and Cornell University have completed a study of the City of Los Angelesâ labor negotiation policies, processes and practices, under contract with the City Controllerâs Office. The objectives of the study are to: ⢠Review negotiations executed within the last three years for lessons learned, as well as review negotiations currently underway. ⢠Evaluate and map the Cityâs current collective bargaining process. ⢠Conduct a nationwide search for promising practices the City could incorporate into the collective bargaining process. ⢠Evaluate the fiscal impacts of labor negotiations. ⢠Evaluate the role of and incentives for each party in the process. ⢠Evaluate the labor-management relationships outside of the bargaining process. ⢠Identify opportunities for improving labor-management relations. Cornell University addressed the Cityâs current labor relations process and identified areas for improvement or consideration (Sections I and III), while Sjoberg Evashenk Consulting focused on the financial implications of the Cityâs collective bargaining practices (Section II). Cornell ILR faculty who contributed their time to this study include: Associate Dean Suzanne Bruyere, Marcia Calicchia (Project Lead), Lou Jean Fleron, Professor Emeritus and former Associate Dean Lois S. Gray, Dean Harry Katz, Sally Klingel, Peter Lazes, Tom Quimby, Jane Savage, Rocco Scanza, Scott Sears, and Associate Dean and Vice Provost for Land Grant Affairs Ronald Seeber. Pam Strausser in Cornellâs Office of Human Resources and Mildred Warner in Cornellâs Department of City and Regional Planning also provided invaluable assistance
Cloud service localisation
The essence of cloud computing is the provision of software
and hardware services to a range of users in dierent locations. The aim of cloud service localisation is to facilitate the internationalisation and localisation of cloud services by allowing their adaption to dierent locales.
We address the lingual localisation by providing service-level language translation techniques to adopt services to dierent languages and regulatory localisation by providing standards-based mappings to achieve regulatory compliance with regionally varying laws, standards and regulations. The aim is to support and enforce the explicit modelling of
aspects particularly relevant to localisation and runtime support consisting of tools and middleware services to automating the deployment based on models of locales, driven by the two localisation dimensions.
We focus here on an ontology-based conceptual information model that integrates locale specication in a coherent way
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