Based on a large-scale, unique longitudinal dataset comprising more than 4m transactions, I first investigate drivers of customers’ point of sale choice (online vs. counter PoS). Second, I study which PoS yields higher purchase decision quality. I establish whether linkages hold across different customer segments and pricing contexts, and examine consumers’ learning effects over time. Third, I ...

deployment, coordination, and evaluation of channels through which firms and customers interact, with the goal of enhancing customer value through effective customer acquisition, retention, and development. The authors identify five major challenges practitioners must address to manage the multichannel environment more effectively: (a) data integration, (b) understanding consumer behavior, (c) ...

This study of hotels representing thirty-seven brands from fifty-six countries uncovers the market conditions under which investing resources in specific market strategies leads to higher performance. Specifically, the authors identified, for the first time in an international context, the circumstances under which customer orientation (acquisition, satisfaction, and retention of customers) alo...

The e-business arena is a dynamic, complex and demanding environment. It is essential to make optimal reuse of knowledge of customer services across various functional units of the enterprise. On the other hand, it is also important to ensure that the customer service staff can access and be trained up with dynamically updated knowledge that meets the changing business environment of an enterpr...

One salient feature of the Internet that distinguishes it from previous technologies for mass communication is it’s bi-directional nature: just as a myriad of firm and product information is available for consumers, so is an abundance of consumer information accessible to firms. This feature allows for firms to use consumer information to define and create value, thereby more accurately persona...

Help desks are computer-aided environments in customer support centers that provide frontline support to external and internal customers. The paper reports on an automated help desk system developed at an information technology company. With the proliferation of diverse software and hardware, the center provides support to a large variety of client systems. The number of calls increases while t...

The web portals business model has spread rapidly over the last few years. Despite this, there have been very few scholarly findings about which services and characteristics make a website a portal and which dimensions determine the customers’ evaluation of the portal’s quality. Taking the example of financial portals, the authors develop a theoretical framework of the web portal quality constr...

Currently, customer segmentation is one of the most relevant and powerful tools for explaining behaviour in e-commerce enables brands to develop personalized acquisition retention strategies each cluster rather than generic, size fits all that are no longer valid[...]