The Clock is Ticking—Or Is It? Customer Satisfaction Response to Waiting Shorter vs. Longer than Expected During a Service Encounter

Customer waits are commonplace in retail settings. To develop efficient wait management strategies, retailers need insights into how customers respond to waiting during service encounters. An intuitive insight supported by extensive research is that a longer wait duration decreases customer satisfaction. However, the same wait duration might have different effects on customers depending on whether it is shorter or longer than what customers expected. To address this question, we draw upon the research on time value and predict asymmetry in the customer satisfaction response to waiting shorter versus longer than expected: Though the clock is often said to be ticking, waiting longer than expected leads to a minor decrease in satisfaction, whereas waiting shorter than expected substantially increases satisfaction. We provide evidence for this asymmetric effect across three studies and identify two boundary conditions: if the source of the expectation is external (e.g., wait time estimate provided by the retailer) or if the wait is much longer than expected. Overall, our research encourages retailers to put the customer response to waiting into perspective: Customers will tolerate waiting longer than expected, up to a certain point.acceptedVersio

On the Thermodynamic Efficiency of Ca2+-ATPase Molecular Machines

AbstractExperimental studies have shown that the activity of the reconstituted molecular pump Ca2+-ATPase strongly depends on the thickness of the supporting bilayer. It is thus expected that the bilayer structure will have an impact on the thermodynamic efficiency of this nanomachine. Here, we introduce a nonequilibrium-thermodynamics theoretical approach to estimate the thermodynamic efficiency of the Ca2+-ATPase from analysis of available experimental data about ATP hydrolysis and Ca2+ transport. We find that the entropy production, i.e., the heat released to the surroundings under working conditions, is approximately constant for bilayers containing phospholipids with hydrocarbon chains of 18–22 carbon atoms. Our estimates for the heat released during the pump operation agree with results obtained from separate calorimetric experiments on the Ca2+-ATPase derived from sarcoplasmic reticulum. We show that the thermodynamic efficiency of the reconstituted Ca2+-ATPase reaches a maximum for bilayer thicknesses corresponding to maximum activity. Surprisingly, the estimated thermodynamic efficiency is very low, ∼12%. We discuss the significance of this result as representative of the efficiency of other nanomachines, and we address the influence of the experimental set-up on such a low efficiency. Overall, our approach provides a general route to estimate thermodynamic efficiencies and heat dissipation in experimental studies of nanomachines

Affective Computing in Marketing: Practical Implications and Research Opportunities Afforded by Emotionally Intelligent Machines

After years of using AI to perform cognitive tasks, marketing practitioners can now use it to perform tasks that require emotional intelligence. This advancement is made possible by the rise of afective computing, which develops AI and machines capable of detecting and responding to human emotions. From market research, to customer service, to product innovation, the practice of marketing will likely be transformed by the rise of afective computing, as preliminary evidence from the feld suggests. In this Idea Corner, we discuss this transformation and identify the research opportunities that it oferspublishedVersio

Local initiation conditions for water autoionization

The pH of liquid water is determined by the infrequent process in which water molecules split into short-lived hydroxide and hydronium ions. This reaction is difficult to probe experimentally and challenging to simulate. One of the open questions is whether the local water structure around a slightly stretched OH bond is actually initiating the eventual breakage of this bond or whether this event is driven by a global ordering that involves many water molecules far away from the reaction center. Here, we investigated the self-ionization of water at room temperature by rare-event ab initio molecular dynamics and obtained autoionization rates and activation energies in good agreement with experiments. Based on the analysis of thousands of molecular trajectories, we identified a couple of local order parameters and show that if a bond stretch occurs when all these parameters are around their ideal range, the chance for the first dissociation step (double-proton jump) increases from 10(-7) to 0.4. Understanding these initiation triggers might ultimately allow the steering of chemical reactions

Highly parallelizable path sampling with minimal rejections using asynchronous replica exchange and infinite swaps

Capturing rare yet pivotal events poses a significant challenge for molecular simulations. Path sampling provides a unique approach to tackle this issue without altering the potential energy landscape or dynamics, enabling recovery of both thermodynamic and kinetic information. However, despite its exponential acceleration compared to standard molecular dynamics, generating numerous trajectories can still require a long time. By harnessing our recent algorithmic innovations—particularly subtrajectory moves with high acceptance, coupled with asynchronous replica exchange featuring infinite swaps—we establish a highly parallelizable and rapidly converging path sampling protocol, compatible with diverse high-performance computing architectures. We demonstrate our approach on the liquid–vapor phase transition in superheated water, the unfolding of the chignolin protein, and water dissociation. The latter, performed at the ab initio level, achieves comparable statistical accuracy within days, in contrast to a previous study requiring over a year

Flipped Gaming: The Teachers Role When Using the Students as Content Providers

In order to activate students and make them active contributors in a class, the concept of “Flipped Classroom” has been used at several Universities, also at The Inland University of Applied Sciences Norway. Flipping the classroom and making the students contribute, and being active, has supported the students learning outcome. Generally, when using games for learning, the game scenario is either decided by the lecturer/teacher, or defined by the designers and/or producers of the game used. In this paper we will explore how the teachers/lecturers role changes when the scenarios to be played in the game environment are defined and developed by the students themselves. The methodological approach is mainly qualitative and the data are observations from gaming sessions, minutes from review processes and interviews with faculty staff responsible for the course. The paper will present how the lecturer/teacher changes role from being the center of attention and the provider of knowledge, to a facilitator that both empower the students and enables the students to contribute towards developing increased understanding and enhanced learning outcome. By enabling the students to contribute in such a way, the support towards the reflection processes described by Donald Schön in his work “The reflective practitioner” from 1991, is being supported in all stages. The reflection before action is when they discuss and agree on scenario, they need to reflect in action upon action, and they need to reflect on action when finished gaming. These reflection processes need to be facilitated in order to support the learning process and when flipping the gaming, this is one of the roles of the facilitator; the lecturer/teacher. The paper will present a project called “Seed corn 2017 – Pedagogical Use of Games in Crisis Management Education”, using a course at The Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Campus Rena, Norway, and the results from the research.publishedVersio

Turning customer satisfaction measurements into action

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on customer orientation by developing and empirically testing a model that attempts to explain the elements that constitute customer orientation and that, in turn, influence customer satisfaction. In particular, this study focuses on how service firms design, collect, analyse and use customer-satisfaction data to improve service performance. This study has the following three research objectives: to understand the process and, as a consequence, the phases of customer orientation; to investigate the relationships between the different phases of customer orientation and customer satisfaction; and to examine activities in the different phases of customer orientation that result in higher customer satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – This study, combining quantitative and qualitative research, is based on a cross-sectional survey of 320 service firms and a multiple case study of 20 organisational units at a large service firm in the European telecom industry. Findings – The results show that customer orientation consists of a process that includes three phases: strategy, measurement and analysis and implementation. Contrary to previous research, implementation has the strongest influence on customer satisfaction. In turn, customer satisfaction influences financial results. In-depth interviews with managers provided insights into the specific activities that are key for turning customer-satisfaction measurements into action. Originality/value – This research contributes to the literature on customer orientation by developing and empirically testing a model that attempts to explain what constitutes customer orientation and, in turn, influences customer satisfaction and financial results. Given the large amount of research on customer satisfaction, studies on how service firms collect and use customer-satisfaction data in practice are scarce