This study is based on the learning theory, focus on TV shopping company¡¦s customer service representatives, it purposes to discuss the influence of individual feature variables to e-learning website usage opinions, and explores the correlation between e-learning website usage opinions and the learning effect. The conclusions of this study are presented as follows: 1.E-learning still can not take place function of the traditional training, but it¡¦s still very possible. 2.The strengths of E-learning are the flexibility of learning time and the control of self-learning schedule. 3.The e-learning needs of sales teams are much more than the administration staffs. 4.The level of student participate is higher, the evaluation of E-learning¡¦s effect is more valuable. 5.There is no significant correlation between e-learning effect and performance in this study. The conclusions above are significant to the human resource management in the following aspects. 1.E-learning is suitable to knowledge intensive industry, it provides more flexible learning styles to self-motivated employees. 2.Effects of training courses are still non-replaceable, the purpose of promoting the e-learning should be providing more channels of learning to improve employee¡¦s professional knowledge and the level of working skill. 3.During the e-learning promotion process, company should build the performance indicators for a suitable evaluation of learning effects.

Background: During the last decades the efforts to foster customer relationships have become important due to increased competition in the consumer markets. One of the most popular strategies have been to introduce customer loyalty programs which are believed to enhance the customer loyalty. The popularity of the customer loyalty programs is based on the beliefs that loyal customers are lucrative and these programs would bond the customers to the company. More recently however, the discussion whether these statements are accurate has started to blossom. Loyal customers are not necessarily as profitable as believed and it is not easy for companies to gain competitive advantage because almost all companies have similar customer clubs. Purpose: This thesis evaluates through a case study of a Swedish retail company whether customer loyalty programs manage to create loyalty among their members. Appropriate features of loyalty will be examined with the intention to evaluate whether there exists other factors outside the loyalty programs that are also influencing the creation of loyalty. Method: A qualitative study was conducted to answer the purpose of the thesis. Within the case study several semi-structured interviews were carried out with INTERSPORT and 20 telephone interviews with INTERSPORT customers. Empirical material was analyzed with a reflection to the theoretical framework and the research questions. Conclusions: Customer loyalty programs can enhance the creation of loyalty, but should be seen as a complement to other aspects of the business, namely, the product line, the customer service and the store concept. However, sustainable customer loyalty is difficult to obtain because many customers today are loyal to several companies instead of one.

“Just as the consumer is becoming more intelligent, the company in parallel should become more intelligent about the customer” (Raisch, 2000, p.4). Internet has become a huge marketplace and to stay competitive in this growing marketplace, companies must improve the way they interact with their customers (Rayport & Jaworski, 2005). As the amount of information online is rapidly growing, customers are becoming more intelligent. Intelligence that in turn makes them more powerful as they with high knowledge becomes high involvement purchasers, which is the opposite to what companies desire. Moreover customers are no longer satisfied with rewards like “bonus-points” or “take three pay for two” campaigns (Kalkota & Robinson 1999). Today’s customers want to be treated individual, they want to feel special, want to feel that the company really take care for them (Newell 2000). The aim with this thesis is to explain how Interactive Agents (IA) as a concept can help companies to attract and retain customers. To do so, we first need to describe what that concept consists of. IA:s can be described as “robots” chatting with the user/customer. They often take graphical form and works with a large knowledgebase that help them deliver the answer a user asks for. The agent is designed to serve customers 24/7 and can, to the opposite of a human, handle more than one case at time. The significant difference between a search-engine and an IA is the technology that allows users to use natural sentences to communicate with the agent instead of only using keywords.  Our findings, that take ground in a literature study followed by an interview with one of the big developers of AI in Sweden, indicates that IA:s could provide companies with an additional value over money savings, which is the main reason according to developers to invest in IA:s. As we can see, two different types of benefits, technical and commercial, can be generated by implementing an IA in an organization. Technical benefits are generated directly from the technology, i.e. make the access to information less complicated and increased knowledge about customers. Commercial benefits are generated as a result of applying this technology and if experienced to a satisfactory level by its target-group, it can generate some commercial benefits, such as goodwill and brand mediation. We would like to conclude our findings to say that IA will be able to generate some value for the system-user and the end-user. However, we believe that to create a value of significance, there are still requirements (see conclusions) that need to be carried out, where the most important part would be interaction with other systems.

This research paper will, based on the frame of references and through a quantitative study, describe how Generation Y prefers to communicate with customer service departments. The purpose is to help companies lower their expenses by focusing on one of the two traditional communication tools, telephone or e-mail. Since more knowledge can arouse new questions this study was executed with an abductive approach. After studying theories regarding Generation Y a hypothesis was created: Customers from Generation Y will choose e-mail rather than telephone, when they are in need of personal customer service from a company. A simulation is used to get a better understanding of social behaviour. In this case two scenarios was simulated to test the research hypothesis. In the first scenario, the customer needs to contact customer service because of an error the company had made. However, in the second scenario is the contact necessary because of a mistake done by the customer. In these scenarios the participants had to make a choice between telephone and e-mail. The reasons for two scenarios are founded on the hypothesis that Generation Y prefers e-mail as communication tool, regardless of the situation. In this quantitative study with Facebook as survey platform, two hundred fifty-nine answers were gathered. Out of these, two hundred twenty-five were respondents belonging to Generation Y. The data collected from this research was analysed and the result showed we could reject our hypothesis in scenario one. In this case it was significantly proved that members from Generation Y prefer telephone instead of e-mail when the company has made an error. In scenario two where the customer had made a mistake there was a slight tendency to choose telephone. However, this could not be significantly proved and therefore we could not reject our hypothesis. To further explore the respondents’ choices a comparison between scenario one and two was made. A cross-tabulation showed that more than fifty per cent of the respondents that chose telephone in scenario one changed their preferred communication tool in scenario two. Our research led to a conclusion that members of Generation Y do not have one communication tool they always prefer to use and their choice of communication tool is not based on the fact that they were brought up during the digital revolution.

Customers are no longer what they use to be in the past, they are now highly educated, more specialized and more highly influenced by global culture than ever before. For businesses to be able to win the heart of customers, they need to do extra because these customers are the pillar that holds the organizations. One of the method to achieve this is called Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The focus of CRM is about managing customer knowledgem to better understand and serve them. The purpose of this study is to explore how e-business organizations use CRM in a B2C setting, and we did that from online fashion retail companies' perspectives. Our study has explored how how CRM objectives are described and how CRM is managed. To answer these questions, relevant literature was reviewed which resulted in a conceptual framework that guided the data collection. We carried out a multiple-case study with two fashion retail companies, one located in the UK, and the other in Sweden. Data was collected through a telephone interviews with high positioned employees who have experience working with CRM and related subject.

Advertising through smart phone applications is one of the fastest growing categories in advertising nowadays. Branded game-apps on mobile phones have several very innovative and attractive aspects, they physically engage their customers into a game, creating on a first level an entertainment but mainly they are advertising their products and the brand’s name. Many studies have been written on gaming, customer engagement and marketing strategies, but only few studies has been written on the convergence of mobile phone technology, gaming and marketing. This research is investigating to which extend this innovative way of marketing can be considered as an efficient marketing strategy. In order to get an insight from both sides of the market, semi-structured interviews have been lead with phone-app experts and users. Similar answers were formulated by both the producers and the users, leading me to the conclusion that a game-app is engaging the users into an overall positive dialogue with the brand. The contribution of this exploratory study is a greater understanding of the phenomenon of branded game-apps, in relation to previous studies on marketing, game mechanisms and brand-consumer relationships.

Seminariedatum: 2013-05-30 Kurs: Mälardalens Högskola, FÖA300, Kandidatatuppsats i Företagsekonomi, 15hp. Författare: Sebastian Enlund & Daniel Kauppinen, Västerås. Titel: Hur används CRM i ishockeyklubben VIK Hockey vars organisation definieras som en hybridorganisation? Handledare: Angelina Sundström. Nyckelord: CRM, Customer Relationship Management, 7P, hybridorganisation . Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att beskriva användandet av CRM i en hybridorganisation. Detta kommer göras genom att studera VIK Hockeys användande av CRM. Metod: En kvalitativ metod har använts för att erhålla empirisk data som sedan analyserats tillsammans med de teoretiska resonemang som legat till grund för denna uppsats. Studieobjektet i denna uppsats har varit elitishockeyklubben VIK Hockey. Slutsats: Den slutsats som togs fram i uppsatsen är den att elitishockeyklubben VIK Hockey inte använder sig utav CRMs fulla potential, det finns stora möjligheter för organisationen att förbättra sitt användande av CRM.

Title:                                  CRM – A case study of Nordea Private Banking Autors:                               David Johansson & Mikael Westin         Advisor:                             Ulf Aagerup Level:                                 Bachelor thesis in International marketing, (15 ECTS), Spring 2013. Keywords:                         CRM, Relationship marketing, Private Banking Question:                           How does Nordea Private Banking work with CRM to get high customer loyalty? Purpose:                            Study and to learn how Nordea Private Banking is working to bring in new customers and keep existing customers loyal. We also want to see if Nordea uses additional strategies that goes beyond the theory and what their customer relationship strategy is. Method:                             The study has a qualitative research method with an inductive approach. Interviews with leading and skilled profiles at Nordea Private Banking has been interviewed to provide answers to our research question. Theoretical framework: The chapter starts with theory about what relationship marketing is and what is driving customer loyalty. Thereafter theory that define CRM and its pros and cons are addressed, and finally the chapter describe the implementation phase. Empirical framework:     In the empirical framework we present the qualitative interviews that were done with employees at Nordea Private Banking. Conclusion:                       The result from this study shows that Nordea Private Banking uses strategies that are common in theory of CRM to gain high customer loyalty and the use of recommendations from satisfied customers is of a much higher significance in Nordea Private Banking’s case than of what the theory is implying. Nordea Private Banking uses a strategy with high focus on the customers and the importance is within relationship marketing and long lasting relations between the adviser and the customer.

ABSTRACTTitle: The Effect of Customer Preferences Dynamism on Incumbent Firms:The Case of Nokia in the Mobile Phone industry.Authors: Adnan Kandeel kandeeladnan@gmail.comDinsel Sali dinsel08@yahoo.comFaculty: Department of Management and EngineeringDate: 27th of May 2013Background: The study of the dynamism of customer preferences’ effect onincumbent firms offers in-depth understanding of the active roleof customers in affecting the position of incumbent firmswhich has been neglected in the vast majority of literaturethat examined the declining position of incumbent firms.Aim: The aim of this thesis is to examine the dynamism of customerpreferences’ effect on incumbent firms.Definitions: Incumbent firm: the dominant firm in an industry.Customer preferences: the collection of attributes including explicitand implicit attributes of a certain product.Preference stereotypes: the implicit prejudgement by customers about a certain product that can not be ascribed to an explicit attribute.Methodology: A qualitative approach where online historical data from 1100 NokiaMobile phone user reviews for 11 years were collected, profiled, andthen analyzed.Completion and results: Incumbent firms are affected by the dynamism of explicit andimplicit preferences through their effect on radical and incrementalinnovation. Furthermore, preference stereotypes can affect incumbentfirms’ ability to impact the change of product meanings throughradical innovation and investment in technology.Keywords: Incumbent firms, Customer preferences dynamism, Radical innovation

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