Group buying is now a popular business mechanism whereby customers are encouraged to bargain together. Today’s group buying usually adopts a fixed group price rather than using a dynamic pricing mechanism and many retailers sell products using both a group buying and a posted price. Therefore, there are usually different shopping channels as the market can be divided into two segments, a group ...

Several surveys show that a significant number of customers leave retail stores because they cannot find the products for which they are looking (e.g. Most research in operations management focuses on two factors to explain lack of product availability—poor assortment and poor inventory planning. Our research with several retailers during the last few years highlights a third factor, poor execu...

The extent to which actual (rather than perceived) performance influences customer satisfaction has received limited attention by researchers, yet it is important for managers to understand the extent to which customer perceptions and behavioral intentions are associated with actual service performance. This study investigates the links between actual and perceived performance, customer standar...

Contact center agents typically respond to email queries from customers by selecting predefined answer templates that relate to the questions present in the customer query. In this paper we present a technique to automatically select the answer templates corresponding to a customer query email. Given a set of query-response email pairs we find the associations between the actual questions and a...

This paper presents the results of a study that evaluated 260 Australian winery websites. It gives a picture of where Australian wine industry website development is in terms of content and design issues. The criteria used to evaluate the websites were designed based on previous works published in the e-commerce literature, and after consultation with personnel in the web development and winery...

In this paper we introduce the globally gated Markovian limited service discipline in the cyclic polling model. Under this policy at most K customers are served during the server visit to a station among the customers that are present at the start of the actual polling cycle. Here the random limit K is the actual value of a finite state Markov chain assigned to the actual station. The model ena...

We consider a stationary multi-class FIFO M/G/1 queue with exponential working vacations, where a server works at two different processing rates. There are K classes of customers, and the arrival rates and the distributions of the amount of service requirements of arriving customers depend on both their customer classes and the server state. When the system becomes empty, the server takes a wor...

Small sports clubs are very often under pressure to have a lot amateur players, talented children, spectators, visitors, but on the other hand they need a lot of sponsors as well. In this area existed very wide spectrum of customers and it is not easy to find out the correct way and strategy to address them. The aim of the paper is to show the way how to create marketing communication strategy ...

The present paper examines the effectiveness of financial overcompensation as a means to enhance customer loyalty after a product failure. Overcompensation implies that customers are entitled to a refund that is larger than the purchase price. It is, however, still unclear whether large overcompensations entail saturation effects, or alternatively, result in an actual drop in customer loyalty. ...

The customers ’preference is derived from reflection on a product or special commercial brand, and factors such as positive appraisal of a brand performance and holding advantages and being unique, establishes the preference. This study aimed to develop a model of female customers' preferences in selecting banks and to train senior managers and banking staff. It had an applied objective, adopte...