B2B customer experience factors: understanding the relationship with SME customers – interim report

As part of the 2014 programme, our members asked us to extend the research done in 2013 (“Measuring Customer Satisfaction And Understanding Customer Effort In A B2B Context” - Tony Harrington and Andrew Bryan) to incorporate the SME customer sector. This project was set up to explore customer experience factors in the SME segment and to address a number of questions:- What are the most important factors that contribute to the customer experience from both the supplier’s and the SME customer’s perspectives? From the customer’s perspective, what about the relationship with the supplier requires the ‘most’ or ‘least’ effort and what changes do customers suggest? Where a customer has both a personal and a business relationship with the supplier, how does this impact their views? The approach was to develop an online survey for completion by SME customers and their supplier. Initially, seven companies and the Henley SME Forum volunteered to participate in the research. However, it proved to be extremely difficult to go from agreement to be involved to actually getting survey responses and, in the event, the survey achieved the following result:- A good response was achieved from 2 companies with around 40 SME responses for each company. A poor response was achieved from 1 company and from the SME Group so their data is currently of limited value. There were other companies that would still like to participate and there are 3 offers to participate at a later date. Analysis of the responses showed that useful conclusions could be made from the data collected so far but that it would be more valuable if more companies were persuaded to participate in the future. As a result, this report has been prepared as an interim statement of what has been learnt and to provide specific feedback to the participating companies. With member’s permission, further responses will be sought at a later date to refine the learning and provide feedback to more companies. This report presents the results of analysis from the survey on a company-by-company basis. Most of the data is only relevant at company level but consolidated results are shown where possible. The results from the analysis of responses lead to a number of initial conclusions. SME companies look to their suppliers to deliver against their promises in a responsive, consistent and proactive manner. Their priority is to have their problems solved in a timely manner. Relationship factors are more important in the B2B relationships between large companies than for SME’s. The SME customer is much more interested in just having the service performed with a minimum of fuss and doesn’t really want to develop a relationship. Questions about customer effort (or the ease of doing business) are as valuable in the SME segment as in any other in terms of identifying opportunities for improvement. Businesses should consider whether their SME customers might also be a customer in their personal home life. If so, they should be aware that this will have an effect on their satisfaction – and could be either positive or negative

How collaborative innovation and co-creation can deliver value: a stakeholder approach

This project explores how collaborative innovation and co-creation between stakeholders can deliver value for firms. In today’s increasingly competitive and fast-changing global marketplace, firms must seek to develop more frequent and higher quality innovations (Ngugi et al, 2010). In addition, customers, employees and other stakeholders are demanding opportunities to co-create and collaborate with businesses more and more. As Ramaswamy (2010) comments: “Providers of products and services are challenged by customers who are increasingly informed, connected, networked and empowered. Customers, employees and stakeholders are demanding higher quality interactions and experiences from businesses and a deeper engagement in the value-creation and service delivery processes” (Ramaswamy, 2010, pp. 22). Given this increasing need to collaborate, innovate and co-create, firms need a better understanding of how they can engage in these activities in a way that maximises the value created for all stakeholders; this project, through exploratory, qualitative research interviews and a wide-ranging literature review, seeks to make a contribution in this area

New Orientations: Touch in Women's Experimental Writing

Through the analysis of women's experimental writing, this thesis examines the significance of touch in exceeding individual and social boundaries, contending that touch has the radical potential to elicit transformation. This thesis explores the way in which touch materialises throughout the experimental works of Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Kathy Acker, arguing that experimental writing facilitates an affective language of touch and sensation that resists and moves beyond societally gendered, racialised, and compulsory heterosexualised constructs of tactile relations. By doing so, this research gestures toward the queer nature of touch to exceed normative frameworks and boundaries posed by conventional language, illuminating, in the readings of these experimental texts, new orientations for thinking through the radical potentials of touch, as a site of resistance that disrupts conventional modes of relation. Within these experimental texts, a politics of touch materialises both thematically and contextually, as well as through the experimental form itself, that operates as a site of counter politics to mainstream ideas of sexual relations. By engaging with contemporary feminist studies that take up issues of touch, such as Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), this thesis proposes that touch functions as an 'orientation device' that informs what it means to be in relation to another. Touch has radical potentialities for transformation through its ability to orientate, reorientate and disorientate the subjects' bodies. Touch, therefore, precipitates change when bodies no longer follow the lines that have previously orientated them, but instead envision new orientations

Antipodean Aesthetics, Public Policy and the Museum: Te Papa, for example

The Museum of New Zealand–Te Papa Tongarewa has proved a complex cultural site that has generated much public debate and a growing academic literature. This article departs from critical approaches that resolve the analysis of this museum by pointing up its programmatic inconsistencies, internal contradictions, representational inadequacies or its institutional paradoxes. Rather than establishing Te Papa as an object for reform the author reads it as an archive for reflection on the cultural predicament of an antipodean modernity

The experience of stigma in people with inflammatory bowel disease with or without incontinence:a hermeneutic phenomenological study - A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the University’s requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy September, 2014

A stigma is ‘an attribute that is deeply discrediting,’ often contravening social norms, and perceived by others as being undesirable. Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is a chronic illness characterised by symptoms of diarrhoea, urgency, and vomiting occurring in a relapsing and remitting pattern. Regular or temporary loss of bowel control is a prominent feature of the disease and may lead to stigmatisation through infringement of social hygiene rules. Although stigma in IBD has been measured in quantitative studies, there is a dearth of qualitative evidence. This Heideggerian (hermeneutic) phenomenological study explores the lived experience of IBD-related stigma. Using purposive stratified sampling, 40 members of a national IBD charity were recruited. Participants did or did not experience faecal incontinence, and did or did not feel stigmatised. Unstructured individual interviews (digitally recorded and professionally transcribed) took place in consenting participants’ homes between May and November 2012. Data were analysed using Diekelmann’s hermeneutic method. Seven relational themes (present in some transcripts) and three constitutive patterns (present in all transcripts) emerged. IBD-related stigma is a complex experience, mostly of anticipated or perceived stigma, which often decreases over time. Stigma changes according to social settings and relationships, but arises from the challenges the disease presents in maintaining social privacy and hygiene rules. Stigma resilience appears most likely in those with a positive sense of control, a support network (particularly of close and intimate others) which suits their needs, and mastery over life and illness. IBD-related stigma occurs regardless of continence status and can cause emotional distress. Time, experience, and robust social support enhance stigma resilience. Further research is needed to confirm features which enable resilience, and to develop stigma-reduction strategies that will promote resilience in this patient group

The Relationship between Self-Described Spirituality and an External or Internal Locus of Control

This study investigates the relationship between spirituality and locus of control using similar definitions and processes of previous research on the topic. This cross comparison of participants who categorize themselves into different groups of spirituality allows for the examination of how people of various spiritual groups can be described as having an internal or external locus of control. Items from questionnaires completed by an undergraduate population were analyzed using a one-way ANOVA to examine the direct relationship between the variables. A significant difference between the groups of participants of differing spiritualities and their locus of control was found. Participants who consider themselves atheists were found to have higher levels of internal locus of control versus participants who labeled themselves agnostic, unsure, spiritual, religious, or a combination of labels. Participants who described themselves as agnostic, unsure, spiritual, religious, or a combination of levels were found to have higher levels of external locus of control versus those who described themselves as atheists. These results offer support for past research and open opportunities for the continuance of studying aspects of the relationship between spirituality and locus of control

A history of New Year’s Eve, Sydney : from ‘the crowd’ to ‘crowded places’

This article presents a history of Sydney's New Year's Eve event. First established when a crowd gathered outside Sydney's General Post Office in 1897 to celebrate the inauguration of International Standard Time, in more recent years it has evolved into a signature event on the city's calendar, drawing in excess of 1 million people into the Central Business District in a spectacular celebration of the global city. For those authorities charged with managing the event an enduring problem concerns the question of security: how is the aggregate of human bodies that gather to be governed in ways that secure it from the risks it presents: be they risks to public order (riot), to the crowd itself (panic), or external to it (terror attack) or to the population (viral spread)? This article maps how crowds have been thought as objects of government in relation to the New Year’s Eve event