Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-121).

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 32-33). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2007. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

In today’s competitive marketplace, simply satisfying customers is no longer sufficient to assure long-term customer-firm relationships, especially for firms that experience a service failure. Companies are now looking for additional ways to secure customer retention and raise customer loyalty. By applying social identity theory, this research empirically explores customercompany identification (customer identification) and its potential predicting factors in a service failure context. Service failures are inevitable but create negative emotions and behaviors in consumers that are directed against service firms. Service recovery from a failure is always a vital step in pacifying dissatisfied customers and maintaining ongoing relationships with them. However, is identification among customers also influenced by service recovery? The effect of customer perceptions of service recovery on customer identification is first examined in the present research. Moreover, given that service recovery may not always work in the desirable way that service firms expect, executing recovery is not the single solution for relationship maintenance following failed service. In contemporary marketing, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is considered a measure for rebuilding customer relationships that offers firms “insurance-like protection against negative situations. Then, would CSR complement a recovery strategy and be effective in protecting firms from service failure? The effect of the interplay between recovery and CSR on customer identification in the advent of a service failure is examined. In addition, today’s customers are eager to participate in their service experience. Customers can now enjoy services by cooperating with service providers. Whereas the current literature emphasizes the benefits of customer participation only in routine service settings, this research attempts to further explore the potential moderating role of customer participation in service delivery (either service provision or service recovery) in influencing customer post-failure identification and subsequent responses in a failure context. A multi-method approach has been adopted in the present research. A field survey was first conducted using a sample of 354 customers in Hong Kong; this was followed by two scenario-based laboratory studies using a total of 370 students. The research findings contribute to the literature and social identity theory by examining the interaction between recovery and CSR with respect to customer identification in a service failure. The results demonstrate that perceived recovery justice positively influences customer post-failure identification with a service firm. Also, high perceived CSR performance is more effective in fostering customer identification when customers have lower justice perceptions regarding the recovery attempt. Furthermore, the research sheds light on the value of involving customers in service delivery. Customer participation in either service provision or recovery strengthens the positive impact of CSR on customer identification and ultimately contributes to customer loyalty intentions. Therefore, involving customers in co-creating service or recovery is a cost-effective strategy to strengthen customer-firm relationships even in the advent of a service failure.

Today’s turbulent business environment has made external knowledge a dominant source of information in firms’ attempt to develop and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Firms need to share and acquire new knowledge as they seek to develop new applications and to survive. Therefore, whether inter-firm information sharing has a direct effect on firm performance has become a central question in studies on strategic management and supply chain management. However, the empirical results remain largely divergent and inconclusive, ranging from a positive relationship to a negative relationship. This study advanced the literature by examining the mediating role of ordinary capabilities (manifested by operations capabilities) in the relationship between information sharing and firm performance. By drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, we propose that information sharing, as a dynamic capability, deploys and reconfigures the existing operations capabilities, which in turn lead to superior firm performance. Furthermore, we used a dimensional approach to look at how the two types of information sharing, focal manufacturer-key suppliers (MS) information sharing and focal manufacturer-key buyers (MB) information sharing, may affect both ordinary capabilities and firm performance. Moreover, this study investigated how a firm’s market orientation moderates the information sharing-operations capabilities link. We argue that market orientation positively strengthens the effects of both MS information sharing and MB information sharing on operations capabilities by driving a continuous and proactive disposition to meeting customer needs. We randomly chose as our sample manufacturing firms from the official list provided by the provincial Association of Entrepreneurs in the Ning Xia autonomous region of China. The data collection was performed over a two-month period and 154 cases were considered valid for our study. Multiple regression and bootstrapping methods were used to test our model. Most of the key hypotheses have been supported. First, operations capabilities fully mediate the relationships between both types of information sharing and performance. Moreover, the three dimensions of market orientation (i.e., market intelligence generation, dissemination, and responsiveness) positively moderate the effects of both MS and MB information sharing on operations capabilities, except for the moderating effect of market intelligence generation in the relationship between MB information sharing and operations capabilities. Several implications, both theoretical and practical, are envisaged. First, our findings, which reveal that operations capabilities fully mediate the effects of information sharing on firm performance, contribute to unpacking the black box of information sharing and performance relationship in the buyer-supplier relationship context. The study offers an alternative explanation for the inconclusive empirical results regarding the relationship between information sharing and firm performance. We propose and verify a theoretical claim suggesting that information sharing is a necessary but insufficient condition to improve firm performance, and operations capabilities that are extended, modified, changed, and/or created by using information sharing determine the firm’s market position, which in turn transforms the potential benefits of information sharing into superior firm performance. Second, our study goes one step beyond existing studies on the interactive effects of marketing capabilities and marketing orientation on firm performance. We demonstrate that it is the interactive effects of dynamic capabilities (information sharing) and market orientation on the development of ordinary capabilities (operations capabilities) that really matter to a firm’s sustained performance supremacy in the long term. The practical implication is that managers must ensure that their firms have ongoing inter-firm information sharing arrangements with their suppliers and buyers. At the same time, they should have good operations capabilities to take advantage of the shared information and transform the benefits into superior firm performance. Another practical implication is that manufacturers need a corporate culture of market orientation to maximize the positive effects of both MS and MB inter-firm information sharing on the development of operations capabilities since at the end of the day it is operations capabilities that contribute directly to the supremacy of a firm’s performance. Keywords: Information Sharing; Dynamic Capabilities; Ordinary Capabilities; Market Orientation

Market globalisation has led globalised companies and corporations to increase focus on synchronised and centralised business operations management to enjoy new and apparently boundless opportunities for growth and profit. The role of supplying companies as partners who provide globally consistent, coordinated and competitive support has been commonly recognised. However, supply base consolidation, increased bargaining power and imposed global competition have increasingly shifted power to the buyers. In order to reinforce balanced and sustainable business dyads, this thesis addresses global account management (GAM), one of the most discussed paradigms within recent sales and customer relationship management literature. Besides this fact, academics and practitioners still struggle to fully capture the dynamic and complex nature of GAM, not least due to the high degree of internal and external interdependence. Hence, the presented work followed an interdisciplinary aggregation of knowledge in the area of key account management (KAM), GAM and corporate culture. Further, best practice mixed-methods research contributed to a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelations and corresponding factors that determine suppliers’ success within global business relationships. Against this background, the case of a globally leading automotive supplier with long established and sophisticated GAM structures was analysed to gain exclusive primary research insights and add to the existing knowledge base. Thereby King’s (1998) template analysis technique found use to evaluate data from 21 semistructured interviews across operational, management and executive experts from global customer organisations (GCOs), supporting the development of a conceptual, novel and unique global account management performance model: the GPM. Moreover, to cope with the boundaries of purely qualitative research, structural equation modelling based on 199 data sets from an international online survey added to the refinement, statistical validation and generalisation of the findings. Through this process, the concept of structural, strategic and (corporate) cultural fit between global suppliers and customers have been revealed as key domains of the GPM, influencing relational and financial GAM performance outcomes. Subsequently, the contributions of the presented thesis are manifold: First, they extend the scope of current GAM performance models, as the GPM provides a more comprehensive view on structural and strategic aspects traditionally in the focus of GAM research. Second, they supplement prior account management research with empirical confirmation and complement earlier work in the field of corporate culture by illuminating the role of corporate culture for the first time in an international business context. Third, the study outcomes provide exclusive evidence for raising customer awareness of suppliers’ culture and cultural compatibility and explicitly outline cultural fit as a critical performance moderator of global account management. This study therefore offers new perspectives on performance determinants of GAM. Academics benefit from original theoretical and practical insights into the underlying mechanisms of global supplier-customer relationships and the GPM enables decision makers to build stronger relationships with a wider range of individual, multi-national and global customers.

M.Phil. / The issue of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) within organisations has gained importance over the last five years, and the trend is set to continue with new CRM software vendors entering the market regularly. For a business, it is cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones, therefore increased customer loyalty and interaction is important. The value that electronic CRM (eCRM) allows is that it increases customer interaction, by eliminating physical intervention and subsequent errors. The Internet has allowed this interaction to become more sophisticated, with service information instantly available to both the customer and the business. The number of channels for interaction has also increased. Specifically, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need low cost eCRM solutions that adapt to their business models and IT structures. The South African SME is limited by certain budgeting, resource and time constraints, and the owner of the SME cannot always devote time in search of a suitable eCRM solution for his business. The multitudes of vendors, offering various levels of functionality with increased focus on the SME sector, allow the SME many choices. However, companies selecting eCRM software vendors often lack an objective basis due to a lack of alternative information sources. Vendors making unsubstantiated and incorrect claims about the functionality of their software, further complicate the problem. From an SME point of view, the functionality and cost criteria of the eCRM solution is the most important. However, the minimum functionality criteria that vendors’ software packages must adhere to, in order to be considered an eCRM suite are: Customer Analysis; Marketing Automation; Sales Automation; Customer Service and Support; and Web-centricity. The research problem lies therein that South African SME owners or managers are unsure which functionalities are available, and which to deem important when considering eCRM solutions for their businesses. The objective of this study is to formulate a matrix of functionality that eCRM solutions must adhere to in order to be successfully implemented by the SME. This matrix is not prescriptive, but will guide SME management by identifying criteria and functionality that the solution needs to contain. The aim is to help SMEs select the right software, not to select the software for them.

Social norms have been claimed to influence customer retention when the social network the customer engages with is well aware of a customer’s use of the product or service. This research investigates whether social norms will also influence customer retention for services that are used so infrequently that the social network the customer engages with is not aware that the customer has the product or service. The specific services investigated are also impacted by the fact that the customers themselves are not entirely certain as to their individual need of the product, namely credence goods. The aim of this research is to provide a profile of a customer that would be more influenced by social norms; which knowledge would allow organisations to target specific customers. Using the Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests, hypotheses were tested by analysing questionnaire feedback data on 100 active insurance customers and 100 inactive insurance customers from within the South African financial services market. Empirical support for the effect of social norms on customer retention of credence goods is found. Empirical proof that females are more influenced by social norms than males was found as well as the link between culture value orientation to social norms. In this research a link between a customer’s age to social norm influence was not found. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / ccgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

This research project explores a number of issues related to the topic of Total Customer Engagement Value, specifically looking to ascertain whether encouraging engagement amongst consumers can be costly to a firm, whether Word of Mouth activity distributed through high engagement channels may be relatively ineffective, whether the acquirement and utilisation of information from these channels can damage an organisation and whether the rewarding of customers for engagement behaviours can lead to resentment on behalf of their lower engaged counterparts. A quantitative study was undertaken wherein the following was measured amongst consumers of Internet Service Providers: Total Customer Engagement Value, Personal Values, the level of technological-savviness of individuals who seek out information from respondents, the stated likelihood of switching to an alternative service provider, measurements related to service expectations, and perceptions related to the preferential treatment of other customers. The study did find that there are a number of potential issues regarding the asserted benefits of customer engagement. It was illustrated that in some instances lesserengaged customers may be more desirable to a firm. Word of Mouth may remain isolated to a group of similar individuals, and thus limit the supposed effectiveness of the spread of information via social media. Focussing on Highly-Engaged individuals as a source of information was also shown to be potentially dangerous, as they differed in four of their personal values. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / zkgibs2014 / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / MBA / Unrestricted

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