Franchised small businesses will not survive their first 5 years if they cannot implement marketing strategies that appeal to their customers. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the marketing strategies that successful franchise small business leaders used to retain customers. The population comprised 4 business leaders at franchise small businesses in North Carolina. Competitive advantage theory and blue ocean theory grounded this study. Data were collected using semistructured face-to-face interviews and review of company marketing materials. Data were thematically analyzed, and 6 themes emerged: personalization of customer service, market segmentation, innovative advertising, networking, brand identity, and loyalty programs. Market segmentation and innovative advertising are fundamental strategies for retaining customers within the target market, whereas personalization of customer service can help build positive relationships with customers. These findings could improve customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, which might increase the number of successful small businesses in the United States. The implications for positive social change include the potential for business leaders to develop effective marketing strategies to retain customers, which may benefit customers through an increase in job opportunities in the local business community.

Promoting informal workplace learning to improve workplace learning and performance within a competitive business environment presents a challenge for customer service training managers within a large corporation. The purpose of the study was to determine which attributes of informal workplace learning experiences contributed to meaningful professional development and improved performance. Constructivism and experiential learning provided the theoretical foundations for this study. Conceptually, learning is mediated by the meaning learners attribute to it. The primary research question concerned how customer service training associates perceived informal workplace learning experiences as having meaningful impact on their overall professional development and work performance. An embedded single case study design was used for the study. Data were collected through the use of semi structured interviews of 6 customer service training associates who were selected through maximum variation sampling. Thematic analysis was applied to transcribed interview data. The following were foundational to improvements in learning and performance: (a) participating in work-based projects, (b) receiving feedback through coaching and peer collaboration, (c) associating learning with achieving desired project and professional development objectives, and (d) structuring work activities and support so as to facilitate learning. The study demonstrated that informal workplace learning is grounded in the purposeful integration of certain essential elements. Study results advance social change by contributing to improved learning and performance thus benefitting individual trainers and the customer service organization.

Employees who want to leave their companies may exhibit low morale and commitment to organizations, which may affect the way employees interact with customers. The purpose of this correlational study was to examine the relationship between employees' affective, continuance, and normative commitment to their organizations and their turnover intentions. The target population consisted of individuals with 2 or more years of call center experience who resided in the United States. Meyer, Allen, and Smith's 3-component model of commitment provided the study's theoretical framework. A purposive sampling of participants, which included a targeted audience and individuals who accessed the survey from Facebook and LinkedIn, returned 81 usable surveys. Data were analyzed using multiple linear regression analysis. The overall regression model showed a statistically significant relationship between the 3 forms of commitment and turnover intentions, although normative commitment had the strongest relationship with turnover intentions. Study results provide additional evidence showing that employees' affective, continuance, and normative commitment to their organizations relate to their turnover intentions. These results may contribute to positive social change by helping leaders to better understand the relationship between employees' organizational affective, continuance, and normative commitment and turnover intentions. With this knowledge, leaders may be able to decrease turnover and turnover-related costs and increase firm performance. The money saved from turnover costs can be used to develop employees, invest in the company culture, or contribute to community-related programs.

Chatbots are increasing in popularity, both as a valuable tool for commercial purposes but also as an area of academic research. It has been successfully applied in multiple application areas such as healthcare, education, customer service and work support. Despite the successful use and application of chatbots research has identified two main user experience challenges: technical- and hedonistic limitations. Users also have a hard time understanding what level of competence and functionality they can expect from a chatbot. To combat these challenges, further research is needed to understand the user adoption and perception of chatbots. This study aims to research both the experiences and usage of customer service chatbots but also explore what preferences customers have when it comes to interacting with customer service chatbots or human customer service representatives in e-commerce. The theoretical technology acceptance model called Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) was applied for this study. A quantitative study comparing customer service chatbots versus human customer service representatives was performed by conducting a questionnaire. The results from the questionnaire indicated that the participants of the study in general rated human customer service representatives higher in most question categories. The results indicate that the participants would prefer to interact with human service representatives over customer service chatbots which indicates that there is still opposition and challenges surrounding the adoption of customer service chatbots in e-commerce.

Patientnämndens förvaltning i Stockholm tar årligen emot tusentals samtal som önskar framföra klagomål på vården i Region Stockholm. Syftet med arbetet är att undersöka hur en NLP-robot för klassificering av inkomna klagomål skulle kunna bidra till en ökad effektivitet av verksamheten. Klassificeringen av klagomålen har utförts med hjälp av en metod baserad på Support Vector Machines. För att optimera modellens korrekthet undersöktes hur längden av ordvektorerna påverkar korrektheten. Modellen gav en slutgiltig korrekthet 53,10 %. Detta resultat analyserades sedan med målsättningen att identifiera potentiella förbättringsmöjligheter hos modellen. För framtida arbeten kan det därför vara intressant att undersöka hur antalet samtal, antalet personer som spelar in samtal och klassfördelningen i datamängden påverkar korrektheten. För att undersöka hur effektiviteten hos Patientnämndens förvaltning i Stockholm skulle påverkas av implementeringen av en NLP-robot användes en SWOT-analys. Denna analys visade på tydliga fördelar med automatisering av klagomålshanteringen, men att en sådan implementation måste ske med försiktighet där det säkerställs att tillgången på kompetens är tillräcklig för att förebygga potentiella hot. / Every year Patientnämnden recieves thousands of phone calls from patients wishing to make complaints about the health care in Stockholm. The aim of this work is to investigate how an NLP-robot for classification of recieved phone calls would contribute to an increased efficiency of the operation. The classification of the complaints has been made using a method based on Support Vector Machines. In order to optimize the accuracy of the model the impact of the length of the word vector has been investigated. The final result was an accuracy of 53.10%. The result was analyzed with the goal to identify potential opportunities of improvement of the model. For future work it could be interesting to investigate in how the number of calls, the number of people recording the calls and the distribution between the classes affect the accuracy A SWOT-analysis was performed in order to investigate in how the efficiency of Patientnämnden would be affected by the implementation of an NLP-robot. The analysis showed apparent benefits of automation of complaint management, but also that such an implementation must be done with great caution in order to be able to ensure that the available competence is high enough to prevent potential threats.

This study is rooted in the Service Dominant Logic (SDL) theory and explores the phenomenon of value co-destruction, the context being chatbot-mediated customer service, with a focusing on chatbots affiliation with value-co-destruction and on the impacts outsideof the dyadic relationship between the service provider and receiver, described as the broader consumer ecosystem. It is evident that the relationship between businesses and consumers is being revolutionized through the implementation of chatbots, claiming benefits such as improved operational efficiency, and non-time specific service. However, Plé (2017) argues that SDL research is overly focused on value co-creation and not enough on value codestruction, as well as being too narrowly focused on specific factors, therefore more studies are needed in exploring the effects on the broader ecosystem involved. Therefore, this study aims to explore the value co-destruction and its effects on the broader consumer ecosystem. The research was conducted using a qualitative method, through an interpretivist research philosophy to collect data in the form of the subjective and personal experiences of customers. It also utilized an abductive approach to allow for the generation of new insights through combining established knowledge, empirical evidence, and theory to formulate a proposition and interpretation beyond what is initially apparent. Through semi-structured interviews, 9 participants with prior experiences of customer service orientated interactions with chatbots across various industries were conducted. To analyze the data, a thematic analysis was employed where the findings indicate that in chatbot interactions which result in value co-destruction the effects affect a broader number of stakeholders in the consumer ecosystem such as family and friends.

Research questions: How can businesses improve the trustworthiness and competence of chatbots for consumers? Purpose: The purpose is to investigate how chatbots' perceived competence and trustworthiness impact consumers' willingness to interact with them. The study             aims to identify patterns or businesses to advance  Method: The study relies on qualitative data and semi-structured interviews with consumers about their experience with chatbots. For deeper and more detailed data, it is conducted by interviewing experts with years of experience with chatbots. The data has been then analyzed through thematic analysis.  Conclusion: The study identifies 10 key themes connected to the theories and the two main elements of this research. Companies are advised to give top priority to the identified themes when integrating chatbots into their customer service operations.

This report describes the design and development processes used in creating a customer service training program for Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators (DMBA) by three Instructional Psychology and Technology graduate students from Brigham Young University (the BYU design team). This paper reviews both the product and the process of developing the product. It also contains a formative evaluation of the product and provides a summative evaluation plan to be utilized by DMBA trainers once the product is fully implemented. The strengths and weaknesses of the training program are critiqued and recommendations for improvement are made. Finally, BYU design team members describe their unique contributions throughout this project and individually critique the process and experience.

Supply chain agility has been receiving a lot of attention in recent literature as a way for organizations to become more responsive to change and improve customer service levels. However, agility is typically dealt with qualitatively, and organizations are usually unsure of the steps to take to improve their agility and the customer service level to target. This research studies supply chain agility based on a case study of Intel Corporation, a large semiconductor manufacturer. Here, agility is defined as the ability to satisfy customer demands by reacting effectively to changes in market stimuli. Reacting effectively does not mean reacting to every change in supply or demand. Doing so means increasing supply chain variability unnecessarily, which is amplified by the bullwhip effect. The essence of supply chain agility is determining the degree to which variability should be managed through artificial means such as safety stock, and appropriate triggers for changing production levels and inventory targets. The purpose of this research is to examine factors that influence supply chain agility and identify a cost-effective plan for achieving it. The first phase addresses the problem of identifying target inventory and customer service levels based on regression analysis of historical data and financial analysis of inventory holding costs and stock-out costs. The impact of three factors (forecast error, order lead-time, and demand variability) on the relationship between inventory and customer service level is also examined. The second phase of the research evaluates strategies for production and inventory control with the goal of finding the appropriate trade-off between minimizing cost (of holding inventory and stock-outs) and minimizing variability. Control policies based on the Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) control chart with control limits on demand forecasts are proposed to detect when tighter control of processes is necessary. A Monte Carlo supply chain simulation is used to evaluate the performance of these policies under various levels of forecast error and demand variability. Results indicate that several control chart-based policies outperform Intel's current planning policy in terms of cost without significantly increasing variability. The selection of the appropriate policy must be based on the decision-makers' desire to minimize cost compared to the desire to minimize variability, as each policy results in a trade-off between these two objectives.

This study sought to determine customer satisfaction levels of faculty and staff with their technology support office in a large university in Florida. The focus of research was to determine if there were any differences in customer satisfaction based on four demographics: gender, faculty versus staff, educational level and age. An anonymous customer satisfaction survey included 26 Likert-type scale questions measuring 16 service quality dimensions was administered to the population. The 16 service quality dimensions included 10 dimensions from Zeithaml et al. (1990), five dimensions from Besterfield et al. (1995, 2003), and one dimension, overall satisfaction. Findings showed there was a statistically significant difference in two demographics, gender and faculty versus staff. Regarding gender, there were no differences in 14 of 16 dimensions examined. The two dimensions with differences were tangibles and understanding the customer, with males having lower customer satisfaction than females. Regarding faculty versus staff differences, there were no differences in all the dimensions other than the courtesy dimension for which faculty had a lower level of customer satisfaction level than staff. Regarding educational level and age, there were no differences in any of the 16 dimensions.