Abstract Power electricity is the main energy for steel factory, the service quality on power dispatch to be linked with the whole performance of steel factory, face more serious challenge from the global competition, for managing the competition of inner and outer environment and creating corporate competitive advantages, how to provide higher service quality to reach customer satisfaction, become the key performance index for Power Dispatch Department in the future. This study represents an empirical assessment of service quality and customer satisfaction. The main structure and assessment are based on the PZB conceptual mode of service quality evaluation form ¡§ SERVQUAL ¡¨ and customer satisfaction theory, research objects are the customers of power consumer in steel factory, the study explored the relationship among customer satisfaction, service quality, corporate image, and price. The main conclusions are as follows: 1. Service quality has a positive effect on customer satisfaction; Corporate image and price of service have positive effect on customer satisfaction; The price of service directly influences service quality. 2. There are five dimensions extracted to evaluate the service quality on power dispatch, including reliability, empathy, responsiveness, assurance and safety tangibles. To evaluate the customer satisfaction, there are two out of five dimensions were statistically significant related to customer satisfaction. 3. The impact on customer satisfaction, the corporate image is the most important factor to customer satisfaction, service quality next and price last from this study. 4. This research compares SERVQUAL and SERVPERF evaluating models of service quality, the result is ¡§ SERVPERF ¡¨ has higher explanation ability (42.2%) on customer satisfaction, and empathy is a more important factor than responsiveness , but this is reverse of SERVQUAL. 5. Partial demographic statistics variable have significant differences to service quality, price, Corporate image, and customer satisfaction. Keywords: Service quality, Customer satisfaction, Corporate image

Advertising has been playing an important role in Marketing for a long time. An effective advertising can help the business to promote their brand and convey the product information to the target consumer successfully. In addition, there are some advantages of advertising haven¡¦t been discovered yet. The purpose of this study is to combine ¡§Marketing¡¨ with ¡§Finance¡¨ to explore the influence of marketing strategies on finance by discussing the relationship between advertising, customer satisfaction and shareholder value. The empirical study finds two important elements influencing on the shareholder value. First, advertising can create the intangible assets such as goodwill and reputation and transform those intangible assets into the cash flow to the business, and then increase the shareholder value. Second, according to the past study asserting that there are positive relationship between the customer satisfaction and shareholder value, this study also gets the positive and significant result. This study applied the LISREL model to verify the relationship between advertising, customer satisfaction and shareholder value through the process of direct and indirect effect on shareholder value. We find that the indirect effect of advertising is significant because the advertising increases shareholder value indirectly by increasing the customer satisfaction. The findings of this study can help the business manager to realize the interactions between ¡§Marketing¡¨ and ¡§Finance¡¨ and to make strategic decision to maximum the shareholder value by noticing that the role of marketing is as important as the financial performance.

There is a growing consensus that senior management in either marketing or finance department should not evaluate the marketing performance only by marketing metrics, e.g. market share, sales growth, customer satisfaction, and etc., but focusing on maximizing shareholder value because they do not understand how or even whether those marketing metrics benefit shareholders. To follow this trend, this article investigates whether a firm¡¦s advertising expenditure, customer satisfaction, and research-and-development (R&D) expenditure have effects on total risk, systematic risk, and unsystematic risk of its common stock. After examining American and Taiwan stock market in the period from 2001 to 2005, the study finds that, conforming to the hypotheses in the study, advertising and customer satisfaction can significantly lower all a firm¡¦s total risk, systematic risk, and unsystematic risk of its common stock. The result of R&D, however, rejects the hypotheses in the study and even previous research and states that R&D would increase a firm¡¦s total risk, systematic risk, and unsystematic risk of its common stock in American stock market, yet increase systematic risk and decrease unsystematic risk in Taiwan stock market. The implication of this study may offer senior managers an alternative thinking of controlling business risk and resource allocation.

In contrast to the declining numbers of new-cars sold in Taiwan, the revenue of car repairing has grown year by year. However, many third-party (non- manufacturer -owned) garages still went bankrupt every month. Therefore, for keeping their profitability and sustainability, those third-party garages need to boost their competitiveness. The main purpose of this research is to find the methods of increasing third-party garage¡¦s competitiveness. This research uses simulative skills to study the selected object. The scope of this study contains the third-party garages¡¦ maintenance management system, cooperative models with suppliers, and customer relationship.

China has shown its economic potential since the market is open to the world two decades ago. Firms have to consider how to stand out in the fierce competition when this world factory. This research adapts qualitative approach to understand how Taiwanese companies perform customer relationship management in different industries. Besides, relationship marketing concept is incorporated into the research to better understand ¡§Chinese deal¡¨ in reality. In the findings, the research shows that for Business to Business approach companies, negotiation and long-term communications have positive influences in building trust among organizations. As in Business to Customer approach, firms have to rely on channel management and different marketing mix to strengthen the relationship. Moreover, the research has found that relationship marketing lies in all stages in maintaining good relationship in Chinese market. Therefore effective networking becomes one of the focuses for firms to maintain long-term and profitable customer relationship.

ABSTRACT ¡@¡@With the global economic change and rising pressure of market competition, product-oriented business trend changed into customer-oriented gradually. It becomes an important task about how to enhance the competitiveness of enterprises, response the requirement from customer, and making better interaction with customer. Therefore, the role of boundary spanner has become more and more important for organization. The past research of boundary spanner almost focus on the quantitative research method of personal managerial skills of boundary spanner, validity and verification for boundary spanner personal scale and the performance between boundary spanner and organization. This research adopts the narrative method, taking customer service engineer as example, Start from the borders of boundary spanner, hoping to provide another observation of boundary spanner. The result of research indicates that there are four features of the work of boundary spanner : Practice bring efficient learning, Situated learning lead adaptive behavior, Low profile adapt role conflict and adaptive behavior is negative to continued learning and challenge the management of company. Hope these results could be the reference of academic continued research and company training. Also hope these result could be the inspiration of other customer service engineer and encourage them to make more contributation on their job.

<p><em> “Just as the consumer is becoming more intelligent, the company in parallel should become more intelligent about the customer”</em> (Raisch, 2000, p.4)<em>.</em></p><p>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).</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p> </p>

<p>Background:</p><p>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.</p><p>Purpose:</p><p>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.</p><p>Method:</p><p>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.</p><p>Conclusions:</p><p>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.</p>

Techn. Univ. , Diss.--München, 2006.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 75 p. : ill. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-53).