CANASTA (crash analysis troubleshooting assistant) is a Digital proprietary knowledge-based system developed by the Artificial Intelligence Applications Group (AIAG) at Digital Equipment Corporation in collaboration with Digital's customer support centers (CSCs). It is targeted to assist computer support engineers at CSCs in analyzing operating system crashes, traditionally one of the most comp...

Firms offer customer support via multiple channels, such as telephone, web portal, web chat and interactive voice-response units, but the efficacy of interactions at these channels is poorly understood. In this paper, we develop a novel information stock-based model to understand customers’ usage behavior for support services in a multichannel scenario. Our setting is that of a US-based health ...

a r t i c l e i n f o New technology-based firms aim to create commercially successful products and services based on new technology. For example a startup company may be founded to commercialize a particular technology developed by a university. One of the key challenges is to identify which products and services are valuable for customers. However, the relevant knowledge is typically disperse...

With the development of the Internet and Electronic Commerce (EC), enterprises have overcome the space and time barriers and are now capable of serving customers electronically. However, it is a great challenge to attract and retain the customers over Internet. One approach is to provide the responsive personalized service to satisfy the customer demand and promote sales at the first time. Henc...

Latest studies found that an insufficient customer focus when developing business ideas represents a crucial factor in the failing of start-ups. That is why different concepts to early involve customers are being discussed in the literature more often recently. These concepts aim at including customers in the development and testing of new business ideas from the beginning. With the terms custo...

This study took the service provider’s perspective to investigate the connections among customers’ positive and negative mood states and employees’ mood, emotional labor perception, and service performance. It also examined the impact of self-monitoring and social support on these connections. We used questionnaires to survey 314 customer contact employees. We found that customer mood did affec...

The authors examined the relationships between perceived organizational support, organizational commitment, commitment to customers, and service quality in a fast-food firm. The research design matched customer responses with individual employees' attitudes, making this study a true test of the service provider-customer encounter. On the basis of a sample of matched employee-customer data (N = ...

In the current manufacturing environment of intense competition, mass customization becomes a crucial capability for a company to survive. Acquiring and identifying customer needs is an important aspect of mass customization. Emotional terms are often included in the description of customer needs and customer evaluations. At the same time, products that consider emotion responses and evoke posi...