Measuring Customer Satisfaction in the Local Ghanaian Restaurant Industry

As the Ghanaian food sector continues to grow and with Ghanaian consumers perception for quality food been on the rise, the issue of customer satisfaction continues to engage the mind of academia and local restaurant managers. This research ascertained the critical determinants that influence customer satisfaction in the Ghanaian local restaurant industry. The aftermath of the study showed that out of the five variables utilized only the three variables (namely food quality, service quality and price) had significant influence in determining customer satisfaction The study clarified that service quality variables (which included attentive staff, efficient staff, staff's knowledge about food, staff greeting customers) have the most critical impact in determining customer satisfaction. After service quality, came food quality and price

Factors That Impacted Customer Retention of Banks. A Study of Recently Acquired Banks in the UPSA Area of Madina, Accra (Specifically Access Bank).

The Ghanaian Banking industry is highly competitive, with 25 universal banks and over 120 other financial institutions (PWC, 2012). Majority of these universal banks and other financial institutions’ products and service offerings are easy to replicate and when they provide nearly identical services, they can only differentiate themselves on the basis of price, better customer management and quality (Effah, 2012). Therefore, customer retention has become potentially an effective tool that banks can use to gain an invaluable edge and survive in Ghana’s increasingly competitive banking environment. Essential elements influencing customers’ selection of a bank include the range of services, rates, fees and prices charged (Abratt & Russell, 1999). It is obvious that superior service, alone, is not sufficient to satisfy customers. Prices are essential, if not more important than service and relationship quality. Furthermore, service excellence, meeting client needs, and providing innovative products are essential to succeed in the banking industry. Most of the banks claim that creating and maintaining customer relationships are important to them and they are aware of the positive values that relationships provide (Colgate et al., 1996). Although, several studies have emphasized the significance of customer retention in the banking industry, majority have failed to provide empirical justification that explains the customer’s repeat purchase from a behavioural perspective. Hence, this study examined the constructs that impacted consumers’ decision to exhibit repeat purchase from a behavioural perspective with their current banks in the UPSA area of Madina, Accra (specifically Access bank). The research design used for the study is descriptive research. An intercept approach which is a convenience sampling method or a non-probability sampling method was used to distribute and gather data using structured questionnaire. Results suggest that the most important constructs were customer satisfaction, followed by corporate image. There was also evidence that customers’ age groups and level of education contributed to explaining respondents' propensity to stay with their current banks. Keywords: customer retention, customer satisfaction, Ghanaian banking industry

An empirical investigation into branch coverage for C programs using CUTE and AUSTIN

Automated test data generation has remained a topic of considerable interest for several decades because it lies at the heart of attempts to automate the process of Software Testing. This paper reports the results of an empirical study using the dynamic symbolic-execution tool. CUTE, and a search based tool, AUSTIN on five non-trivial open source applications. The aim is to provide practitioners with an assessment of what can be achieved by existing techniques with little or no specialist knowledge and to provide researchers with baseline data against which to measure subsequent work. To achieve this, each tool is applied 'as is', with neither additional tuning nor supporting harnesses and with no adjustments applied to the subject programs under test. The mere fact that these tools can be applied 'out of the box' in this manner reflects the growing maturity of Automated test data generation. However, as might be expected, the study reveals opportunities for improvement and suggests ways to hybridize these two approaches that have hitherto been developed entirely independently. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Harvey: A Greybox Fuzzer for Smart Contracts

We present Harvey, an industrial greybox fuzzer for smart contracts, which are programs managing accounts on a blockchain. Greybox fuzzing is a lightweight test-generation approach that effectively detects bugs and security vulnerabilities. However, greybox fuzzers randomly mutate program inputs to exercise new paths; this makes it challenging to cover code that is guarded by narrow checks, which are satisfied by no more than a few input values. Moreover, most real-world smart contracts transition through many different states during their lifetime, e.g., for every bid in an auction. To explore these states and thereby detect deep vulnerabilities, a greybox fuzzer would need to generate sequences of contract transactions, e.g., by creating bids from multiple users, while at the same time keeping the search space and test suite tractable. In this experience paper, we explain how Harvey alleviates both challenges with two key fuzzing techniques and distill the main lessons learned. First, Harvey extends standard greybox fuzzing with a method for predicting new inputs that are more likely to cover new paths or reveal vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Second, it fuzzes transaction sequences in a targeted and demand-driven way. We have evaluated our approach on 27 real-world contracts. Our experiments show that the underlying techniques significantly increase Harvey's effectiveness in achieving high coverage and detecting vulnerabilities, in most cases orders-of-magnitude faster; they also reveal new insights about contract code.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1807.0787

Evacon: a framework for integrating evolutionary and concolic testing for object-oriented programs

Achieving high structural coverage such as branch coverage in objectoriented programs is an important and yet challenging goal due to two main challenges. First, some branches involve complex program logics and generating tests to cover them requires deep knowledge of the program structure and semantics. Second, covering some branches requires special method sequences to lead the receiver object or non-primitive arguments to specific desirable states. Previous work has developed the concolic testing technique (a combination of concrete and symbolic testing techniques) and the evolutionary testing technique to address these two challenges, respectively. However, neither technique was designed to address both challenges at the same time. To address the respective weaknesses of these two previous techniques, we propose a novel framework called Evacon that integrates evolutionary testing (used to search for desirable method sequences) and concolic testing (used to generate desirable method arguments). We have implemented our framework and applied it on six classes taken from the Java standard library and basic data structures. The experimental results show that the tests generated using our framework can achieve higher branch coverage than evolutionary testing or concolic testing alone

Solar-driven photodegradation of ciprofloxacin and E. coli growth inhibition using a Tm3+ upconverting nanoparticle-based polymer composite

Solar-driven photocatalysis is of great interest in terms of a sustainable use of energy and its application in wastewater treatment. The UV light-driven photogeneration of H2O2 by solar irradiation is an advanced strategy for the treatment of bacteria and recalcitrant pollutants in wastewater, but suffers from low efficiencies. In this work, a solar-driven multifunctional nanocomposite consisting of Tm3+ upconverting nanoparticles, poly(vinyl alcohol), poly(acrylic acid) and hydroxylated sulfonated poly(ether ether ketone) was prepared. The components were crosslinked via a heating treatment at 170 °C, resulting in a non-leaching porous material. This nanocomposite exhibited excellent adsorption ability (89 % in 150 min) toward a 100 mg/L ciprofloxacin aqueous solution and proved to photodegrade it (50 %) upon 4 h artificial solar irradiation, exploiting photon upconversion processes. Moreover, an 80 % bactericidal effect against E. coli was registered upon sunlight irradiation. Altogether, these results suggest the feasibility of a solar-driven wastewater treatment based on upconverting nanoparticles