12,401 research outputs found
Multichannel in a complex world
The proliferation of devices and channels has brought new challenges to just about every
organisation in delivering consistently good customer experiences and effectively joining up
service provision with marketing activity, data and content. A good multichannel strategy and
execution is increasingly becoming essential to marketers and customer experience
professionals from every sector. This report seeks to identify the key issues, challenges and opportunities that surround
multichannel and provide some best practice insight and principles on the elements that are
key to multichannel success. As part of the research for this report, we spoke to six
experienced customer experience and marketing practitioners from large organisations
across different sectors.
In Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, Akin Arikan
(2008) said:
‘Because customers are multichannel beings and demand relevant, consistent experiences
across all channels, businesses need to adopt a multichannel mind-set when listening to
their customers.’
It was clear from the companies interviewed for this report that it remains challenging for
many organisations to maintain consistency across so many customer touchpoints. Not only
that, but the ability to balance consistency with the capability to fully exploit the unique
attributes of each channel remains an aspiration for many.
The proliferation of devices and digital channels has added complexity to customer journeys,
making issues around the joining up of customer experience and the attribution of value of
key importance to many. Whilst senior leaders within the organisations spoken to seem to be
bought in to multichannel, this buy-in was not always replicated across the rest of the
organisation and did not always translate into a cohesive multichannel strategy. A number of companies were undertaking work around customer journey mapping and
customer segmentation, using a variety of passive and actively collected data in order to
identify specific areas of poor customer experience and create action plans for improvement.
Others were undertaking projects using sophisticated tracking and tagging technologies to
develop an understanding of the value and role of specific channels and to provide better
intelligence to the business on attribution that might be used to inform future investment
decisions.
A consistent barrier to improving customer experience is the ability to join up many different
legacy systems and data in order to provide a single customer view and form the basis for
delivery of a more consistent and cohesive multichannel approach.
Whilst there remain significant challenges around multichannel, there are some useful
technologies allowing businesses to develop better insight into customer motivation and
activity. Nonetheless, delivery of seamless multichannel experience remains a work-inprogress
for many
Spin dynamics in the generalized ferromagnetic Kondo model for manganites
Dynamical spin susceptibility is calculated for the generalized ferromagnetic
Kondo model which describes itinerant electrons interacting with
localized electrons with antiferromagnetic coupling. The calculations
done in the mean field approximation show that the spin-wave spectrum of the
system in ferromagnetic state has two branches, acoustic and optic ones.
Self-energy corrections to the spectrum are considered and the acoustic
spin-wave damping is evaluated
Classical spin liquid instability driven by off-diagonal exchange in strong spin-orbit magnets
We show that the off-diagonal exchange anisotropy drives Mott insulators with
strong spin-orbit coupling to a classical spin liquid regime, characterized by
an infinite number of ground states and Ising variables living on closed or
open strings. Depending on the sign of the anisotropy, quantum fluctuations
either fail to lift the degeneracy down to very low temperatures, or select
non-collinear magnetic states with unconventional spin correlations. The
results apply to all 2D and 3D tri-coordinated materials with bond-directional
anisotropy, and provide a consistent interpretation of the suppression of the
x-ray magnetic circular dichroism signal reported recently for
-LiIrO under pressure
Nonlinear dynamic intertwining of rods with self-contact
Twisted marine cables on the sea floor can form highly contorted
three-dimensional loops that resemble tangles. Such tangles or hockles are
topologically equivalent to the plectomenes that form in supercoiled DNA
molecules. The dynamic evolution of these intertwined loops is studied herein
using a computational rod model that explicitly accounts for dynamic
self-contact. Numerical solutions are presented for an illustrative example of
a long rod subjected to increasing twist at one end. The solutions reveal the
dynamic evolution of the rod from an initially straight state, through a
buckled state in the approximate form of a helix, through the dynamic collapse
of this helix into a near-planar loop with one site of self-contact, and the
subsequent intertwining of this loop with multiple sites of self-contact. This
evolution is controlled by the dynamic conversion of torsional strain energy to
bending strain energy or, alternatively by the dynamic conversion of twist (Tw)
to writhe (Wr).
KEY WORDS Rod Dynamics, Self-contact, Intertwining, DNA Supercoiling, Cable
HocklingComment: 35 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Proceedings of the Royal Society A:
Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Science
Magnetic and orbital ordering in cuprates and manganites
The mechanisms of magnetic and orbital interactions due to double exchange
(DE) and superexchange (SE) in transition metal oxides with degenerate e_g
orbitals are presented. Specifically, we study the effective spin-orbital
models derived for the d^9 ions as in KCuF_3, and for the d^4 ions as in
LaMnO_3, for spins S=1/2 and S=2, respectively. Such models are characterized
by three types of elementary excitations: spin waves, orbital waves, and
spin-and-orbital waves. The SE interactions between Cu^{2+} (d^9) ions are
inherently frustrated, which leads to a new mechanism of spin liquid which
operates in three dimensions. The SE between Mn^{3+} (d^4) ions explains the
A-type antiferromagnetic order in LaMnO_3 which coexists with the orbital
order. In contrast, the ferromagnetic metallic phase and isotropic spin waves
observed in doped manganites are explained by DE for degenerate e_g orbitals.
It is shown that although a hole does not couple to spin excitations in
ferromagnetic planes of LaMnO_3, the orbital excitations change the energy
scale for the coherent hole propagation and cause a large redistribution of
spectral weight. Finally, we point out some open problems in the present
understanding of doped manganites.Comment: 155 pages, 66 figure
How will disenfranchised Peoples adapt to Climate Change? Strengthening the Ecojustice Movement
The Fourth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged
That millions of people are currently, and will increasingly be, affected by the impacts of climate change, in the form of floods, droughts and other extreme events, as well as related threats to food security. In response to these global environmental changes, the international community, including civil society, is acting on the need for immediate adaptation measures and is developing strategies for future adaptation. However, the impacts of climate change are unevenly distributed, with many of the poorest, most vulnerable peoples experiencing the immediate effects of climate change, in the here and now. As the IPCC noted, developing countries are disproportionately affected by climate change and often, the least able to adapt due to lack of infrastructure and resources
Spin-1 effective Hamiltonian with three degenerate orbitals: An application to the case of V_2O_3
Motivated by recent neutron and x-ray observations in V_2O_3, we derive the
effective Hamiltonian in the strong coupling limit of an Hubbard model with
three degenerate t_{2g} states containing two electrons coupled to spin S = 1,
and use it to re-examine the low-temperature ground-state properties of this
compound. An axial trigonal distortion of the cubic states is also taken into
account. Since there are no assumptions about the symmetry properties of the
hopping integrals involved, the resulting spin-orbital Hamiltonian can be
generally applied to any crystallographic configuration of the transition metal
ion giving rise to degenerate t_{2g} orbitals. Specializing to the case of
V_2O_3 we consider the antiferromagnetic insulating phase. We find two
variational regimes, depending on the relative size of the correlation energy
of the vertical pairs and the in-plane interaction energy. The former favors
the formation of stable molecules throughout the crystal, while the latter
tends to break this correlated state. We determine in both cases the minimizing
orbital solutions for various spin configurations, and draw the corresponding
phase diagrams. We find that none of the symmetry-breaking stable phases with
the real spin structure presents an orbital ordering compatible with the
magnetic space group indicated by very recent observations of non-reciprocal
x-ray gyrotropy in V_2O_3. We do however find a compatible solution with very
small excitation energy in two distinct regions of the phase space, which might
turn into the true ground state of V_2O_3 due to the favorable coupling with
the lattice. We illustrate merits and drawbacks of the various solutions and
discuss them in relation to the present experimental evidence.Comment: 36 pages, 19 figure
Black Holes in Higher-Derivative Gravity
Extensions of Einstein gravity with higher-order derivative terms arise in
string theory and other effective theories, as well as being of interest in
their own right. In this paper we study static black-hole solutions in the
example of Einstein gravity with additional quadratic curvature terms. A
Lichnerowicz-type theorem simplifies the analysis by establishing that they
must have vanishing Ricci scalar curvature. By numerical methods we then
demonstrate the existence of further black-hole solutions over and above the
Schwarzschild solution. We discuss some of their thermodynamic properties, and
show that they obey the first law of thermodynamics.Comment: Typos corrected, discussion added, figure changed. 4 pages, 6 figure
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