More and more enterprises use Internet and WWW to improve their contacts to customers and to enhance customer relationships. The link between e-commerce and customer relationship management is well-known and is discussed in different publications (e.g. Hagel/Armstrong 1996, Shaw 1999, etc.). But Internet and WWW can offer even more: It can be an enabler for new and innovative business strategie...

F are investing millions to deploy Web-based self-services at their call centers. The rationale for such investment is that the firm’s cost of interacting with its customers through the Web-based channel is an order of magnitude cheaper than the assisted channels such as telephony. We conduct a field study at the call center of a prominent U.S. health insurance firm to examine this cost-saving ...

While demand response has achieved promising results on making the power grid more efficient and reliable, the additional dynamics and flexibility brought by demand response also increase the uncertainty and complexity of the centralized load forecast. In this paper, we propose a game-theoretic demand response scheme that can transform the traditional centralized load prediction structure into ...

Cloud computing requires that customers trust that a service provider’s platforms are secured and provide a sufficient level of integrity for the client’s data. However, a lack of trust between cloud customers and providers has hindered the universal acceptance of clouds as an increasingly popular approach for the processing of large data sets and computationally expensive programs. Existing te...

W explore using an option contract as a price discrimination tool under demand uncertainty. In our capacity game model, a monopolistic supplier has to build capacity before observing the uncertain demand. The demand is generated by two potential customers, who privately know their own types. The types could be either high or low, differing in willingness to pay for each unit of demand. To discr...

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Customer Relationship Management has entered the mainstream. Despite the uncertainty of the economy, CRM is being thrust into corporate budgets and talked about as a critical initiative by numerous of companies. It has gone from being an important edge in the business world to a necessary tool for survival. Building an effective CRM system can get more effectively in acquiring new customers, in...

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology for translating customer wants (WHATs) into relevant engineering design requirements (HOWs) and often involves a group of cross-functional team members from marketing, design, quality, finance and production and a group of customers. The QFD team is responsible for assessing the relationships between WHATs and HOWs and the interrelationships be...

Importance performance analysis (IPA) is a technique used for conducting a relative-position comparison of specific evaluation items by using “importance” (the degree of importance as perceived by customers) and “performance” (the degree of customer satisfaction regarding the performance of an enterprise). Moreover, it is an approach for incorporating the voice of the customer into product deve...

Although it is habitual to measure human perceptions with quite accurate instruments, perceptions are characterized by uncertainty and fuzziness. Furthermore, variations in individual perceptions and personality mean that the same words can indicate very different perceptions. In this context, the fuzzy linguistic approach seems to be an appropriate framework for modeling information. In this p...