Using the Critical Incident Technique to Assess Gaming Customer Satisfaction

Before gaming organizations can initiate efforts to service their customers, they must be able to effectively manage the service encounter. Although every service encounter is not necessarily critical to satisfaction, it is not always obvious which are crucial to the customer and which are not. Using critical incidents reported by gaming customers and employees, this study identifies service encounters that both parties perceive as being very satisfactory or very dissatisfactory from the customer\u27s point of view. Identifying particularly positive and negative customer service experiences can provide direction for management in allocating resources specifically to those areas that maximize customer satisfaction and correct those that cause customer dissatisfaction

Casino Atmospherics from a Customer\u27s Perspective: A Re-Examination

Considerable research in recent years has examined the influence of physical evidence, or atmosphere, in a variety of service settings, including leisure services. Not fully covered has been the area of atmosphere in a casino gaming setting. This extension of a previous study further investigates atmospherics in casinos. The findings showed that customers defined casino atmosphere in five key elements: theme, floor layout, ceiling height, employee uniforms, and noise level. Three of the five contributed positively to a player\u27s satisfaction with the gaming experience as shown by the regression analysis. This reinforces previous indications of the need for casino management to create an inviting atmosphere that will maximize customer satisfaction, with specific attention to those aspects that players appear to value most highly

Revolution Moosehide

Revolution Moosehide is a 47-minute documentary that follows Melaw Nakehko, a Dene moosehide tanner, activist, artist and actor, from the Northwest Territories. Nakehkos is an extraordinary journey of cultural resurgence and revitalization, as she learns the practice of moosehide tanning from Dene Elders across the Northwest Territories. Joined by several young women, the process of learning and practicing moosehide tanning leads to deeper realizations about Dene community, culture and identity, while also intersecting with an emergent wave of political action erupting from Indigenous movements across Turtle Island, otherwise known as Canada. This documentary and thesis situates Melaws story within an era of responsive Indigenous activism, contextualized in a lineage which follows the Idle No More movement. This is an era rooted in the important of forming grassroots organizations focused on leadership and rooted in cultural identity, with a political imperative to build vital visions of stable futures for and by Indigenous communities in Northern Canada

Long-term Care in Turmoil

The reformulation of the regulation of long-term care seen in the recent White Paper and Royal Commission in the UK has led to topical debates on long-term care for older people. Given that there are over 500,000 people in residential nursing and dual registered homes across the country, there has, until now, been remarkably little research on the role of managers in the long-term care sector, the various tasks they undertake in the day-to-day operation of a care home, and the qualities and qualifications they bring to their work. This study investigates the range of tasks which managers of long-term care homes perform, and the skills they should possess to do their work. The opening chapter reproduced here provides a critical analysis of the current confusion which besets UK policy on long term care.long-term care; aging

Critical incidents in the gaming industry: Perceptions of guests and employees

During the service encounter or moment of truth the customer judges the quality of the service organization. Not all guest-employee service encounters, however, are equally important. For every organization there are probably particular. service encounters that are critical to customer satisfaction. Before they can initiate efforts to service their customers, service firms must first identify and manage critical service encounters. Using the environment of the gaming industry, this exploratory research investigated the concept of identifying and evaluating critical service encounters from the perspectives of both guests and customer-contact employees and measured the level of congruence/incongruence between the two parties involved in the service interaction. The study also examined the applicability of the critical incident classification scheme of Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990) to the gaming industry the critical incident technique, slot customers and slot department employees of a major Las Vegas strip hotel/casino were interviewed using the same set of open-ended questions. Slot customers and employees were asked to recall both particularly satisfactory and dissatisfactory service events that had transpired at the study hotel/casino or another hotel/casino. Employees were asked to recall incidents in the manner in which they felt their customers perceived the incidents. The model and decision tree of Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990) was used to code the recalled incidents. Two judges completed the initial round of coding, and then a third judge independently coded the incidents in order to obtain a measurement of inter-rater reliability; All of the customer and employee reported incidents were classified into major groups, categories, and subcategories. All of the major groups agreed with the classification of the Bitner, Booms and Tetreault (1990). However, two new categories and two subcategories that differed from Bitner, Booms and Tetreault emerged in this study. These new categories and subcategories appeared to be more specific to the gaming industry and were designated as response to customer requests, response to customer requests for comps, and comp service. The subcategories were related to requests for non-smoking rooms. Systems and service encounter problems identified included the unavailability of non-smoking rooms, slot machine fill, change service, and booth cashier service; The results showed that as a whole, customer-contact employees in this study demonstrated a genuine service orientation and did identify with and understand customer needs in the gaining environment. This was particularly true in the perception of dissatisfactory incidents reported by both customers and employees. The majority of satisfactory incidents customer and employee reported incidents concerned unprompted and unsolicited actions, in particular, attention paid to the customer. This finding highlights the importance of hiring service-oriented staff as well as directing training and other organizational resources towards cultivating a close customer-frontline employee relationship. The distributions of customer and employee critical incidents as compared to respective distributions found by Bitner, Booms, and Tetreault (1990) and Bitner, Booms, and Mohr (1994) suggest the need to continue to their model in terms of incident distribution in other industries

Sleep and Breathing at High Altitude

This thesis describes the work carried out during four treks, each over 10-11 days, from 1400m to 5000m in the Nepal Himalaya and further work performed during several two-night sojourns at the Barcroft Laboratory at 3800m on White Mountain in California, USA. Nineteen volunteers were studied during the treks in Nepal and seven volunteers were studied at White Mountain. All subjects were normal, healthy individuals who had not travelled to altitudes higher than 1000m in the previous twelve months. The aims of this research were to examine the effects on sleep, and the ventilatory patterns during sleep, of incremental increases in altitude by employing portable polysomnography to measure and record physiological signals. A further aim of this research was to examine the relationship between the ventilatory responses to hypoxia and hypercapnia, measured at sea level, and the development of periodic breathing during sleep at high altitude. In the final part of this thesis the possibility of preventing and treating Acute Mountain Sickness with non-invasive positive pressure ventilation while sleeping at high altitude was tested. Chapter 1 describes the background information on sleep, and breathing during sleep, at high altitudes. Most of these studies were performed in hypobaric chambers to simulate various high altitudes. One study measured sleep at high altitude after trekking, but there are no studies which systematically measure sleep and breathing throughout the whole trek. Breathing during sleep at high altitude and the physiological elements of the control of breathing (under normal/sea level conditions and under the hypobaric, hypoxic conditions present at high altitude) are described in this Chapter. The occurrence of Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS) in subjects who travel form near sea level to altitudes above 3000m is common but its pathophysiology not well understood. The background research into AMS and its treatment and prevention are also covered in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 describes the equipment and methods used in this research, including the polysomnographic equipment used to record sleep and breathing at sea level and the high altitude locations, the portable blood gas analyser used in Nepal and the equipment and methodology used to measure each individual’s ventilatory response to hypoxia and hypercapnia at sea level before ascent to the high altitude locations. Chapter 3 reports the findings on the changes to sleep at high altitude, with particular focus on changes in the amounts of total sleep, the duration of each sleep stage and its percentage of total sleep, and the number and causes of arousals from sleep that occurred during sleep at increasing altitudes. The lightest stage of sleep, Stage 1 non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, was increased, as expected with increases in altitude, while the deeper stages of sleep (Stages 3 and 4 NREM sleep, also called slow wave sleep), were decreased. The increase in Stage 1 NREM in this research is in agreement with all previous findings. However, slow wave sleep, although decreased, was present in most of our subjects at all altitudes in Nepal; this finding is in contrast to most previous work, which has found a very marked reduction, even absence, of slow wave sleep at high altitude. Surprisingly, unlike experimental animal studies of chronic hypoxia, REM sleep was well maintained at all altitudes. Stage 2 NREM and REM sleep, total sleep time, sleep efficiency and spontaneous arousals were maintained at near sea level values. The total arousal index was increased with increasing altitude and this was due to the increasing severity of periodic breathing as altitude increased. An interesting finding of this research was that fewer than half the periodic breathing apneas and hypopneas resulted in arousal from sleep. There was a minor degree of upper airway obstruction in some subjects at sea level but this was almost resolved by 3500m. Chapter 4 reports the findings on the effects on breathing during sleep of the progressive increase of altitude, in particular the occurrence of periodic breathing. This Chapter also reports the results of changes to arterial blood gases as subjects ascended to higher altitudes. As expected, arterial blood gases were markedly altered at even the lowest altitude in Nepal (1400m) and this change became more pronounced at each new, higher altitude. Most subjects developed periodic breathing at high altitude but there was a wide variability between subjects as well as variability in the degree of periodic breathing that individual subjects developed at different altitudes. Some subjects developed periodic breathing at even the lowest altitude and this increased with increasing altitude; other subjects developed periodic breathing at one or two altitudes, while four subjects did not develop periodic breathing at any altitude. Ventilatory responses to hypoxia and hypercapnia, measured at sea level before departure to high altitude, was not significantly related to the development of periodic breathing when the group was analysed as a whole. However, when the subjects were grouped according to the steepness of their ventilatory response slopes, there was a pattern of higher amounts of periodic breathing in subjects with steeper ventilatory responses. Chapter 5 reports the findings of an experimental study carried out in the University of California, San Diego, Barcroft Laboratory on White Mountain in California. Seven subjects drove from sea level to 3800m in one day and stayed at this altitude for two nights. On one of the nights the subjects slept using a non-invasive positive pressure device via a face mask and this was found to significantly improve the sleeping oxyhemoglobin saturation. The use of the device was also found to eliminate the symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness, as measured by the Lake Louise scoring system. This finding appears to confirm the hypothesis that lower oxygen saturation, particularly during sleep, is strongly correlated to the development of Acute Mountain Sickness and may represent a new treatment and prevention strategy for this very common high altitude disorder

Evolution and the big-5 personality factors: Individual differences in response to sexual and emotional infidelity

This study is designed to investigate individual differences in response to emotional and sexual infidelity and by doing so place the Big-5 model of personality in another important social context

Evolution and the big-5 personality factors: Individual differences in response to sexual and emotional infidelity

This study is designed to investigate individual differences in response to emotional and sexual infidelity and by doing so place the Big-5 model of personality in another important social context

Riverboat Site Selection

The riverboat casino is the most rapidly expanding segment of the gaming industry. Six states have already legalized riverboat/dockside gaming, and it is currently under review in at least 13 other states. The explosion of this gaming market is fueled by a combination of demand and supply side forces. Gaming, as a form of entertainment, is growing in popularity and acceptance. States experiencing hard economic times view riverboat gaming as a means to generate both non-tax receipts and tourism. Gaming companies seek to profit from this emerging market that has an apparently high demand and, initially, little competition. Competition, however, must continue at a level that allows a new entrant to gain a profitable share of the market. As competition in riverboat gaming continues to escalate, site selection will become an increasingly important factor in predicting the future success or failure of an operation. This paper looks at locational issues in Iowa and Illinois based on market and competitive forces. A regression model, using financial data from the respective state\u27s gaming boards and demographic data from SCAN/US, was developed to relate the gross win and win per square foot (dependent variables) to the independent variable of a population radius. The results were compared to a survey of gaming executives operating in the same states