• Customer satisfaction: The result of optimizing and aligning business processes to fulfi ll customers’ needs, wants, and desires. • Cost reduction: The result of optimizing operations and supplier processes. • Cycle and fulfi llment time reduction: The result of optimizing the manufacturing and logistics processes. • Quality: The result of optimizing the design, development, and production pr...

I a viral marketing campaign, an organization develops a marketing message and encourages customers to forward this message to their contacts. Despite its increasing popularity, there are no models yet that help marketers to predict how many customers a viral marketing campaign will reach and how marketers can influence this process through marketing activities. This paper develops such a model...

A high quality customer database is a cornerstone of successful interactive marketing strategies and tactics. Based on the notion that customer data quality is not only a technical but also an organizational problem, this study develops and tests an organizational learning framework of the relationship between organizational processes, customer data quality and firm performance. The findings sh...

This paper presents a profit-oriented shift scheduling approach for inbound contact centers. The focus is on systems in which multiple agent classes with different qualifications serve multiple customer classes with different needs. We assume that customers are impatient, abandon if they have to wait, and that they may retry. A discrete-time modeling approach is used to capture the dynamics of ...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Reverse logistics Metrics Goal-setting theory Knowledge-based view Partial least squares Business to business reverse logistics processes are shaped in large part by a firm's strategy to meet regulatory (e.g. waste electrical and electronic equipment directive) and certification (e.g. ISO 14000) requirements. Firms adopt both recommended and internally developed ...

A large number of visualization tools have been created to help decision makers understand increasingly rich databases of product, customer, sales force, and other types of marketing information. This article presents a framework for thinking about how visual representations are likely to affect the decision processes or tasks that marketing managers and consumers commonly face, particularly th...

The aim of this study is to present directions for advancing export marketing theory in the Asia Pacific Region. To do so, I build on recent research in other regions of the world. Additionally, I build on exploratory findings on the exporting dynamics and processes used by exporting firms based in a European country (Portugal) that has suffered an “export boom” in the last two decades. My find...

Marketing managers developing strategies to market products on the Internet are faced with important issues. We suggest that the use of Web advertising, virtual store-fronts and virtual communities provides innovative opportunities for marketers to communicate with consumers, understand their preferences and personalize the marketing offers at far lesser costs and far more effectively than thro...

Industrial marketing and purchasing is an interesting phenomenon. On the surface it appears as very mundane, a simple day-to-day activity performed by purchasers, sales personnel, and technical specialists; i.e. most often by professions representing ‘middle management’. As such, it is not surrounded with any of the greater prestige ascribed to more hyped business activities, such as financing ...

There is an increasing awareness within both the research literature and commercial practice that Web systems have a number of unique characteristics. Many organisations are responding to this by identifying modified processes that purport to address these unique characteristics. There is, however, the potential to utilise these processes as a marketing tool (indicating organisational capabilit...