The Impact of Digital Service Quality Toward Customer Engagement: A Case Study of Telemedicine in Thailand

Purpose: The aims of this study are to examine the effect of digital service quality on customer engagement with telemedicine systems and to investigate how such effects change depending on a variety of socioeconomic characteristics.   Design/methodology/approach:  The survey research with online questionnaire was conducted with 405 telemedicine experienced samples. The proposed hypotheses were tested using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method.   Findings:  The results revealed that digital service quality significantly influences customer engagement. A second-order confirmatory factor analysis of the digital service quality (DSQ) construct revealed that the efficiency dimension best explained DSQ, followed by the responsiveness and interaction dimensions. The study of moderation revealed that the effect of DSQ on CE was greater in younger age groups than in older age groups. In addition, those with a higher level of formal education appear to have higher levels of CE than those with a lesser level of formal education.   Research, Practical & Social implications: The study will help practitioners create telemedicine services that are more efficient and effective so that patients are more engaged and loyal to the telemedicine service providers.   Originality/value: The value of the study is that it is one of the rare attempts to clarify the consequences of digital service quality from the perspective of the consumer, and it proposes several implications and recommendations

Innovativeness in Thai family SMEs: An exploratory case study

Over the past decade, academic research has revealed innovativeness to be one of the core components effecting SME performance. This research aims to study the linkage between innovativeness and “familiness” in family SMEs. The paper employs a qualitative approach and exploratory case studies, in collecting data on three categories of firms manufacturing, trading and servicing companies in order to identify how “familiness” effects the innovativeness of their family SMEs. To identify how “familiness” either accelerates or decelerates innovativeness in family SMEs, we adopted the F-PEC scale as a tool to study the connection between family and business values and also the impact of family commitments to the company. We found that power, experience and culture accelerate innovativeness in family SMEs. The paper illustrates the important role of family in firm innovativeness and how this can bring competitive advantage and success to family SMEs

Applications of Blockchain in Business Processes: A Comprehensive Review

Blockchain (BC), as an emerging technology, is revolutionizing Business Process Management (BPM) in multiple ways. The main adoption is to serve as a trusted infrastructure to guarantee the trust of collaborations among multiple partners in trustless environments. Especially, BC enables trust of information by using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). With the power of smart contracts, BC enforces the obligations of counterparties that transact in a business process (BP) by programming the contracts as transactions. This paper aims to study the state-of-the-art of BC technologies by (1) exploring its applications in BPM with the focus on how BC provides the trust of BPs in their lifecycles; (2) identifying the relations of BPM as the need and BC as the solution with the assessment towards BPM characteristics; (3) discussing the up-to-date progresses of critical BC in BPM; (4) identifying the challenges and research directions for future advancement in the domain. The main conclusions of our comprehensive review are (1) the study of adopting BC in BPM has attracted a great deal of attention that has been evidenced by a rapidly growing number of relevant articles. (2) The paradigms of BPM over Internet of Things (IoT) have been shifted from persistent to transient, from static to dynamic, and from centralized to decentralized, and new enabling technologies are highly demanded to fulfill some emerging functional requirements (FRs) at the stages of design, configuration, diagnosis, and evaluation of BPs in their lifecycles. (3) BC has been intensively studied and proven as a promising solution to assure the trustiness for both of business processes and their executions in decentralized BPM. (4) Most of the reported BC applications are at their primary stages, future research efforts are needed to meet the technical challenges involved in interoperation, determination of trusted entities, confirmation of time-sensitive execution, and support of irreversibility