Knowing how to handle angry customers following a service failure is an important aspect of a service provider’s work role. This paper presents a conceptual framework to help marketing academics and managers better understand: (1) how customer anger is provoked by a service failure; and (2) how customer anger may be reduced through using specific service recovery attempts by service providers. ...

The purpose of this study was to develop the yet limited empirical knowledge on the intensity of customer interaction and on specific customer roles in service innovation processes. An empirical study of twelve (12) business service innovation projects was conducted in cleaning and security, financial, and ICT services. Overall, direct customer interaction in service development can be characte...

Advancements in information technology have changed the way customers experience a service encounter and their relationship with service providers. Especially technology-based self-service channels have found their way into the 21 century service economy. While research embraces these channels for their cost-efficiency, it has not examined whether a shift from personal to self-service affects c...

As service centers become crucial corporate assets for increasing customer relationships and profits, it is imperative to understand customer reactions to service allocations. Using customer call history from a DSL service, the authors empirically investigate how customers’ onshore and offshore experience affects service duration and customer retention. They formulate service channel allocation...

Satisfying customers is the best method for organizations to gain competitive advantage. To deliver quality services to customers, we need to understand their expectations. Given accurate understanding of expectations, customer service, which can be regarded as a process that consists of several steps to satisfy customer requirements, should be redesigned to match them. This research intends to...

Some servers are to be located at nodes of a network. Demand for services of these servers is located at each node and a subset of the nodes is to be chosen to locate one server in each. Each customer selects a server with a probability dependent on distance and a certain amount of benefit is achieved after giving service to the customer. Customers may waive receiving service with a known prob...

Private karaoke rooms (known as “KTV” or karaoke television) are a special type of leisure space in Taiwan. The focus of this study is to show the relationship between service quality, brand image, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty in the KTV industry. This study examines two chain KTV operations in Taiwan, with two locations for each chain; the study comprises a total of 255 valid qu...

While the Internet is used by enterprises for contacting with customers, network-based customer services with e-mail or web-based interfaces have been developed to replace the traditional call centers with telephone interfaces. However, most existing network-based customer services heavily rely on manpower to reply e-mail or on-line requests submitted by customers, which not only increases the ...

Service quality and its relationship with customer satisfaction has received considerable academic and business attention in recent years. But the nature of the relationship between these two constructs is not well-explained in the literature. This study used the SERVPERF model as proposed by Cronin & Taylor (1992) to assess perceived service quality in a Vietnamese organization, and then studi...

Ever since the 1990s, the role of call centers has been transformed from a cost to be minimized to a crucial element that performs integrated marketing functions. Call centers have become among the most crucial corporate assets to grow customer relationships and firm profits. In this paper, we formulate the traditional operation management decision of call allocations as a customer relationship...