The aim of this thesis is to propose a model that explains the relationship between customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty based on service quality attributes. The three elements of satisfaction, retention and loyalty towards products represent ongoing challenges for the corporate financial performance. Customer behaviour analysis (known as business intelligence or customer relationship management or customer experience management) has become a major factor in the corporate decision making and strategic planning processes. Prevailing logic dictates that by improving service attributes one should expect better customer satisfaction levels. Consequently, improved satisfaction levels should increase the probability of customer retention and degree of loyalty. Substantial research work has been dedicated to explain the importance of customer behaviour measurement for industry. However, there is little evidence that there has been an overall integrating empirical research that relates the three elements of satisfaction, retention and loyalty with respect to service quality attributes. Empirical data collected from the UK mobile telecommunication for this research shows that such an objective model that is capable of capturing this three dimensional relationship will contribute towards more robust decision making and better strategic planning. The proposed thesis extracts the data about key service attributes from a combination of literature review, surveys, and interviews from the UK mobile telecommunication industry. Responses were analysed using multiple regression, regression analysis with dummy variables, logistic regression, logistic regression with dummy variables and structural equation modelling (SEM) to test variables and their interrelationships. This study makes a step forward and contributes to the body of knowledge as it: (a) highlights the role of service attribute performance towards customer satisfaction, consequently identifies attributes that affect satisfaction and dissatisfaction of customers, (b) maps the relationship between attribute importance and attribute performance, (c) optimise resource allocation process using importance-performance analysis (IPA), (d) classifies customers with respect to the role and length of relationship they have with the company (switching probability), and (e) describes the interrelationship between customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty. The novelty of the research lies in: (a) establishment of a framework that links service attribute performance to customer satisfaction and then to customer future intentions (customer retention and customer loyalty), and (b) provision of a model that could assist key decision makers in prudent usage of resources for maximum profitability. This dissertation presents a novel approach methodology and modelling construct for customer behaviour analysis. For proof of concept it presents a case study in the mobile telecommunication industry. It is worth noting that in this research work Customer Retention is interpreted as probability of switching between service providers. Customer Loyalty is interpreted as referral (word-of-mouth) activity by existing customers.

Customer calls serve as a valuable source of feedback for financial service providers, potentially containing a wealth of unexplored insights into customer questions and concerns. However, these call data are typically unstructured and challenging to analyze effectively. This thesis project focuses on leveraging Topic Modeling techniques, a sub-field of Natural Language Processing, to extract meaningful customer insights from recorded customer calls to a European financial service provider. The objective of the study is to compare two widely used Topic Modeling algorithms, Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and BERTopic, in order to categorize and analyze the content of the calls. By leveraging the power of these algorithms, the thesis aims to provide the company with a comprehensive understanding of customer needs, preferences, and concerns, ultimately facilitating more effective decision-making processes.  Through a literature review and dataset analysis, i.e., pre-processing to ensure data quality and consistency, the two algorithms, LDA and BERTopic, are applied to extract latent topics. The performance is then evaluated using quantitative and qualitative measures, i.e., perplexity and coherence scores as well as in- terpretability and usefulness of topic quality. The findings contribute to knowledge on Topic Modeling for customer insights and enable the company to improve customer engagement, satisfaction and tailor their customer strategies.  The results show that LDA outperforms BERTopic in terms of topic quality and business value. Although BERTopic demonstrates a slightly better quantitative performance, LDA aligns much better with human interpretation, indicating a stronger ability to capture meaningful and coherent topics within company’s customer call data.

The management and implementation of unique resources contribute to the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage that has a positive impact on the owner of the resource’s profits. Customer relationship management becomes very important because customers with their own personal devices and options such as cloud computing, social media and mobility have converged into a renewed driving force expecting organisations to remember their experiences. These experiences should not been stored in separate channels or silos. With a customer resource management system organisations could have the opportunity to get better insights of customers and derive better business value. Customer data should be managed by organisations just like any other corporate asset. Because of the importance of customer data and the critical advantage it creates, organisations see an effective customer data management strategy as an important cornerstone of a customer relationship management strategy. A system should have the ability to provide accurate, timely, and reliable data and information that can tailor customer capabilities that could influence an organisation’s performance. Big data is an extension of customer relationship management and big data customer relationship management initiatives will require integration and analysis of both structured and unstructured data to identify the most relevant insights of a customer and determine the most appropriate customer action. Knowledge management should be applied to solve business problems to support current work styles and make better use of social software. The biggest reason for organisations to address knowledge management is the impact of fast retrieval of the right information to ensure customer satisfaction. The role of information technology is to enable information management and transform the organisation to business excellence. Information technology is a powerful tool for defining, organising, and building knowledge assets within an organisation. Information technology is developing fast and organisations can apply technology to enhance their competence which showed a positive correlation in a customer focused approach. Together with customer resource management, market resource management could be used to support more customer centric strategies with fewer resources. Management of customer resources using information technology could develop significant customer relationships and improve an organisation’s competitive advantage in the market. Exploratory research found that in selected South African business schools the use of a customer resource management system to analyse the growing volume and variety of customer information can create better customer insights. The customer resource management system supports marketing efforts and can create new business by gaining new customers. / MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

The management and implementation of unique resources contribute to the creation of a sustainable competitive advantage that has a positive impact on the owner of the resource’s profits. Customer relationship management becomes very important because customers with their own personal devices and options such as cloud computing, social media and mobility have converged into a renewed driving force expecting organisations to remember their experiences. These experiences should not been stored in separate channels or silos. With a customer resource management system organisations could have the opportunity to get better insights of customers and derive better business value. Customer data should be managed by organisations just like any other corporate asset. Because of the importance of customer data and the critical advantage it creates, organisations see an effective customer data management strategy as an important cornerstone of a customer relationship management strategy. A system should have the ability to provide accurate, timely, and reliable data and information that can tailor customer capabilities that could influence an organisation’s performance. Big data is an extension of customer relationship management and big data customer relationship management initiatives will require integration and analysis of both structured and unstructured data to identify the most relevant insights of a customer and determine the most appropriate customer action. Knowledge management should be applied to solve business problems to support current work styles and make better use of social software. The biggest reason for organisations to address knowledge management is the impact of fast retrieval of the right information to ensure customer satisfaction. The role of information technology is to enable information management and transform the organisation to business excellence. Information technology is a powerful tool for defining, organising, and building knowledge assets within an organisation. Information technology is developing fast and organisations can apply technology to enhance their competence which showed a positive correlation in a customer focused approach. Together with customer resource management, market resource management could be used to support more customer centric strategies with fewer resources. Management of customer resources using information technology could develop significant customer relationships and improve an organisation’s competitive advantage in the market. Exploratory research found that in selected South African business schools the use of a customer resource management system to analyse the growing volume and variety of customer information can create better customer insights. The customer resource management system supports marketing efforts and can create new business by gaining new customers. / MBA, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Es stellt einen bedeutsamen Marktvorteil für ein Unternehmen dar, abschätzen zu können, welche Produktidee auf dem Markt erfolgreich sein könnte und welche scheitern wird. Auf Basis psychologischer Erkenntnisse aus verschiedenen Forschungsfeldern kann die Marktforschung für Innovationen bereits in frühen Entwicklungsstadien wichtige Hinweise auf das Erfolgspotential eines neuen Produktes geben. Diese Arbeit beleuchtet zwei Aspekte der psychologischen Marktforschung für Innovationen genauer: Wie groß sind Bewertungsunterschiede zwischen Personen, die sich in gewissen Personeneigenschaften unterscheiden und welchen Einfluss hat die Präsentation einer Innovation auf die anschließende Bewertung? Zwei Studien wurden durchgeführt, um diese Fragen zu adressieren. Die Ergebnisse zeigen kaum Einfluss der Personeneigenschaften auf die Innovationsbewertung. Bezüglich der unterschiedlichen Präsentationsart ergeben sich keine signifikanten Unterschiede zwischen Bild- und Videopräsentationen. Wird die Innovation jedoch real erlebt, wird sie signifikant passender, besser bedienbar und begeisternder wahrgenommen. Die Implikationen für weitere Forschung und für die Praxis der Marktforschung werden diskutiert. / Early knowledge on what may and what may not be market success in the future is a key success factor for any company. Taking into account findings from different fields of psychology, market research in early development stages can provide important insights on the potential of a new product. Two aspects of psychological market research for innovations are studied in depth: To what extent do people with different personal attributes differ in their evaluation of an innovation? What are the effects of different presentation formats like pictures and videos when an innovation is evaluated? Two studies are conducted to attend to these questions. The results show little evidence that personal attributes influence the innovation evaluation. With regard to presentation format, only small evaluation differences are found between picture and video presentations. However, when the product is actually experienced, it is perceived to be more compatible, easier to use, and more exciting. Options for further research and practical implications are discussed.

For a retailer, who has a close and everyday contact with its customers, understanding the customers can be of benefit if they know how to use the information in the right way. One way of using the customer is to integrate customers when developing new services, to enhance the possibility of the new service gaining market acceptance. Customer insight, Omnichannel retailing and Big Data are areas that recently have caught the interest of retailers. The latter two are of interest as these provide retailers with better possibilities of gaining customer insight, by taking the opportunities to observe the customers’ virtual footsteps to a whole new level. This thesis is a study made with the market research company Nepa as employer of the thesis, in order to develop their B2B offer with end-customer integration. Why and how customers are integrated were further studied through the frame of reference. The factors that were chosen to describe from a theoretical standpoint how customers can be integrated were type of integration, role of the customer, type of customer and timing of the integration. The underlying factors that were chosen to answer why retailers choose different alternatives among the above mentioned factors were market orientation, service/goods dominant logic, environmental uncertainty and market maturity. The study was made with a qualitative, positivistic approach using a collective case study. The case study is a good way to be able to answer both how and why-questions and was therefore chosen as method. By investigating multiple cases and performing a cross case analysis the authors were able to draw more generalizable conclusions. Five retailers took part in the study and for each of these a developed service was chosen as case for investigation. By doing low structured interviews using a method called story-telling, the authors let the respondents from each company speak freely about the chosen case, and that information could then be analyzed. The conclusions of the study concern the different ways retailers choose to integrate customers and the reasons they do it in different ways. A company’s market orientation affects if and what type of customer integration is used in the idea-generating phases. The degree of market orientation also affects the amount of occasions and what type of customer integration is used in the execution-oriented phases. Retailers’ turbulent technology environment has influenced their general perception of risk and the risk of unacceptance with the specific project. This results in that a company can initially integrate customers proactively to let them guide the company or the company can consider customer integration to be secondary. Retailers generally are guided by a goods dominant logic which leads to them not choosing to integrate the customers in active roles in the innovation process. Instead, the retailers combine different integration techniques to gain some of the advantages that active customer could have brought. This is also connected to the retailers wanting to get quickly through the early phases of the process and instead use agile development after the launch of the service. The retailers do not choose different types of customers for integration, but the combination of integration techniques can still provide them with some of the characteristics of the more knowledgeable customer.

Forskningen grundar sig på att det finns en kunskapslucka i utvärderingar av företag som praktiskt implementerar arbetsmetoden Scrum. Det finns tydliga samband mellan kulturen i en organisation och hur denna kan effektivt och framgångsfullt implementera ett agilt arbetssätt (Ilvari, Ilvari, 2011). Forskaren gjorde en semistrukturerad intervjuform med 7 medarbetare. Syftet utvärderar implementering av Scrum som metod samt hur organisationen jobbar med kundinsikter. Resultatet visar att en majoritet av medarbetarna upplever ett högre engagemang och större motivation tack vare det nya arbetssättet. Att sätta kunden i centrum är ett arbete som kräver stort fokus och då inte minst från organisationens ledare. Här har organisationens ledare varit engagerade. Några förbättringspunkter identifierats i forskningen, som till exempel att organisationen behöver bli bättre på att systematiskt mäta och sprida kundinsikter, att utveckla arbetet med att bli en lärande organisation samt att ledningen behöver hitta ett sätt att strategiskt jobba med organisationens kultur. / The research is based on the fact that there is a knowledge gap in evaluations of companies that implement the working method Scrum. There is a connection between the culture of an organization and how it can effectively and successfully implement an agile approach (Ilvari, Ilvari, 2011). The researcher did a semi-structured interview with employees. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the implementation of Scrum as a method and how the organization works with customer insights. The result shows that a majority of employees experience a higher commitment and greater motivation thanks to the new way of working. Putting the customer at the centre is something that requires a lot of focus. And much from the organisation's leaders. Here the organisation's leaders have been highly involved. Some improvement points were also identified in the research, such as systematically measuring and disseminating customer insights, developing the work of becoming a learning organization, and That the management does not work strategically with the organisation's culture. / <p>2019-08-23</p>

When scaling a company it is important to implement customer insights to achieve growth of revenue. Understanding and defining a suitable B2B sales process has also been shown to play an important part in enhancing sales, and traditional processes include multiple steps performed by sales representatives. One step revolves around the presentation of the offered product or service. For sales representatives to present a product or service successfully they must acquire or have deep knowledge of the customer, such as their industry trends and general business. This can be achieved by acquiring customer insights that are data driven. Adopting data driven customer insights has also been proven to increase sales. Therefore, this research investigates the connection between the B2B sales process and the generation and implementation of data driven customer insights. In particular, this research explores the steps included in a B2B sales process at a high technology scaleup and hence how data driven customer insights can enhance the presentation step in the B2B sales process.  The research is carried out through a case study at a case company labelled as a high technology scaleup. Interviews were conducted with sales representatives working in the commercial team at the case company. The result from this research finds that six steps are included in the B2B sales process at high technology scaleups. The steps are as follows: Lead generation, First meeting, Assessment, Contract proposal, Negotiation and Closed deal. The second step includes presenting the offered product or service, which this research identified as most challenging for the sales representatives to execute successfully due to the technical complexity of the product/service. Findings from this research shows that data driven customer insights can be used to simplify this step in the process. For example, data driven customer insights can help personalize presentation material and enable rapport building. In addition, data driven customer insights help align expectations between buyers and sellers during the first meeting, thus increasing the likelihood of reaching a closed deal. / När ett företag ska skalas upp är det viktigt att implementera kundinsikter för att uppnå ökad omsättning. Att förstå och definiera en passande B2B-försäljningsprocess har också visats spela en viktig roll för nå ökade intäkter, och traditionella säljprocesser innehåller flera steg som säljpersonal utför. Ett steg kretsar kring presentationen av den erbjudna produkten eller tjänsten. För att säljpersonal ska kunna presentera en produkt eller tjänst med framgång behöver de förvärva eller ha djup kunskap om kunden, såsom branschtrender och generell verksamhet. Detta kan uppnås genom att anskaffa kundinsikter som är datadrivna. Att använda datadriven kundinsikt har också visats öka försäljningssiffror. Med detta som bakgrund undersöker därför den här forskningen sambandet mellan B2B-försäljningsprocessen och generering och implementering av datadriven kundinsikt. I synnerhet undersöker denna forskning stegen som ingår i en B2B-försäljningsprocess i ett högteknologiskt scale up och därmed hur datadriven kundinsikt kan förbättra presentationssteget i B2B-försäljningsprocessen.  Forskningen utförs genom en fallstudie på ett fallföretag som räknas som ett högteknologiskt scale up. Intervjuer genomfördes med försäljningsmedarbetare som jobbar i det kommersiella teamet på företaget. Resultatet från denna forskning visar att sex steg ingår i B2B-försäljningsprocessen vid högteknologiska scale ups. Dessa sex stegen är: Leadsgenerering, Första möte, Utvärdering, Kontraktsförslag, Förhandling och Avslutad affär. Det andra steget innebär att den erbjudna produkten eller tjänsten presenteras, och detta steg identifieras som mest utmanande för försäljningsmedarbetarna att utföra med framgång på grund av produktens/tjänstens tekniska komplexitet. Vidare visar resultat från denna forskning att datadriven kundinsikt kan användas för att förenkla detta steg i processen. Datadriven kundinsikt kan till exempel hjälpa till att personalisera presentationsmaterial och möjliggöra förtroendebyggande. Dessutom möjliggör datadrivna kundinsikter att köpare och säljare delar gemensamma förväntningar på det första mötet, vilket ökar sannolikheten att uppnå en sluten affär.

Das Konzept von digitalen Kundenzwillingen und hochpersonalisierten „Living Personas“ ermöglicht den wissensdynamischen Dialogpartner für realitätsgenaue Kontext und Bedürfnisanalysen z.B. bei komplexen Marketing-Entscheidungsprozessen. KI-basierte Werkzeuge sind ein kognitiver Begleiter für Planer, Entwerfer, Innovations-, Produkt-, und Marketing-Manager. Die neuen Personalisierungsmöglichkeiten durch individuelle und sich ständig replizierenden „Living Personas und Digital Customer Twins“ schaffen eine gesteigerte Weitsicht, Ideen- und Wissensproduktivität, sowie eine objektivierte Zielgenauigkeit bei Neuentwicklungen und Marktadressierungen. Das bestehende und neu generierte Wissen über personalisierte Kundenbedürfnisse wird durch die immersive Benutzung aktiviert und dabei kontinuierlich aktualisiert. Eine Herausforderung neuer KIbasierter Personas ist die grundsätzliche Generierung planungsrelevanter und dynamischer Kundendaten – die zweite Herausforderung ist es den Entwicklungsbeteiligten einen zugriffseffizienten und benutzeroptimierten Zugang zu dieser neuen Datenqualität im Projektalltag zu ermöglichen.