Abstract: Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to test
a hypothesized model explaining Malaysian hypermarket customers’
perceptions of brand trust (BT), customer perceived value (CPV) and
perceived service quality (PSQ) on building their brand loyalty
(CBL) and generating positive word-of-mouth communication
(WOM). Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data
from 374 Malaysian hypermarket customers from Mydin, Tesco,
Aeon Big and Giant in Kuala Lumpur, a metropolitan city of
Malaysia. The data strongly supported the model exhibiting that BT,
CPV and PSQ are prerequisite factors in building customer brand
loyalty, while PSQ has the strongest effect on prediction of customer
brand loyalty compared to other factors. Besides, the present study
suggests the effect of the aforementioned factors via customer brand
loyalty strongly contributes to generate positive word of mouth
communication.
Abstract: The research of juice flavor forecasting has become
more important in China. Due to the fast economic growth in China,
many different kinds of juices have been introduced to the market. If a
beverage company can understand their customers’ preference well,
the juice can be served more attractive. Thus, this study intends to
introducing the basic theory and computing process of grapes juice
flavor forecasting based on support vector regression (SVR). Applying
SVR, BPN, and LR to forecast the flavor of grapes juice in real data
shows that SVR is more suitable and effective at predicting
performance.
Abstract: The objective of the article was to identify the impacts of gamification on customers' behaviour. The most important applications of games in marketing and mechanisms of gamification are presented in the article. A detailed analysis of the influence of gamification on customers using two brands, Foursquare and Nike, was also presented. Research studies using auditory survey methods were carried out among 176 young respondents, who are potential targets of gamification. The studies confirmed a huge participation of young people in customer loyalty programs with relatively low participation in other gamificationbased marketing activities. The research findings clearly indicate that gamification mechanisms are the most attractive.
Abstract: Entrepreneurs face different sort of difficulties
especially with customers, organizations and employees. Emotional
intelligence which is the ability to understand and control the
emotions is an important factor to help entrepreneurs end up
challenges to the result they prefer. So it is assumed that
entrepreneurs especially those who have passed the first challenging
years of starting a new business, have high emotional intelligence. In
this study the Iranian established entrepreneurs have been surveyed.
According to Iran Gem 2014 report the percentage of established
entrepreneur in Iran is 10.92%. So by using Cochran sample formula
(1%) 96 Iranian established entrepreneurs have been selected and
Emotional intelligence appraisal questionnaire distributed to them.
The SPSS19 result shows high emotional intelligence in Iranian
established entrepreneurs.
Abstract: In our research we aimed to test a managerial
approach for the fuzzy front end (FFE) of innovation by creating
controlled experiment/ business case in a breakthrough innovation
development. The experiment was in the sport industry and covered
all aspects of the customer discovery stage from ideation to
prototyping followed by patent application. In the paper we describe
and analyze mile stones, tasks, management challenges, decisions
made to create the break through innovation, evaluate overall
managerial efficiency that was at the considered FFE stage.
We set managerial outcome of the FFE stage as a valid product
concept in hand. In our paper we introduce hypothetical construct
“Q-factor” that helps us in the experiment to distinguish quality of
FFE outcomes.
The experiment simulated for entrepreneur the FFE of innovation
and put on his shoulders responsibility for the outcome of valid
product concept. While developing managerial approach to reach the
outcome there was a decision to look on product concept from the
cognitive psychology and cognitive science point of view. This view
helped us to develop the profile of a person whose projection (mental
representation) of a new product could optimize for a manager or
entrepreneur FFE activities. In the experiment this profile was tested
to develop breakthrough innovation for swimmers. Following the
managerial approach the product concept was created to help
swimmers to feel/sense water. The working prototype was developed
to estimate the product concept validity and value added effect for
customers.
Based on feedback from coachers and swimmers there were strong
positive effect that gave high value for customers, and for the
experiment – the valid product concept being developed by proposed
managerial approach for the FFE.
In conclusions there is a suggestion of managerial approach that
was derived from experiment.
Abstract: These days customer satisfaction plays vital role in
any business. When customer searches for a product, significantly a
junk of irrelevant information is what is given, leading to customer
dissatisfaction. To provide exactly relevant information on the
searched product, we are proposing a model of KaaS (Knowledge as
a Service), which pre-processes the information using decision
making paradigm using Multi-agents.
Information obtained from various sources is taken to derive
knowledge and they are linked to Cloud to capture new idea. The
main focus of this work is to acquire relevant information
(knowledge) related to product, then convert this knowledge into a
service for customer satisfaction and deploy on cloud.
For achieving these objectives we are have opted to use multi
agents. They are communicating and interacting with each other,
manipulate information, provide knowledge, to take decisions. The
paper discusses about KaaS as an intelligent approach for Knowledge
acquisition.
Abstract: Data mining idea is mounting rapidly in admiration
and also in their popularity. The foremost aspire of data mining
method is to extract data from a huge data set into several forms that
could be comprehended for additional use. The data mining is a
technology that contains with rich potential resources which could be
supportive for industries and businesses that pay attention to collect
the necessary information of the data to discover their customer’s
performances. For extracting data there are several methods are
available such as Classification, Clustering, Association,
Discovering, and Visualization… etc., which has its individual and
diverse algorithms towards the effort to fit an appropriate model to
the data. STATISTICA mostly deals with excessive groups of data
that imposes vast rigorous computational constraints. These results
trials challenge cause the emergence of powerful STATISTICA Data
Mining technologies. In this survey an overview of the STATISTICA
software is illustrated along with their significant features.
Abstract: The value co-creation has gained much attention in
sales research, but less is known about how salespeople and
customers interact in the authentic business to business (B2B) sales
meetings. The study presented in this paper empirically contributes to
existing research by presenting authentic B2B sales meetings that
were video recorded and analyzed using observation and qualitative
content analysis methods. This paper aims to study key elements of
successful sales interactions between salespeople and customers/
buyers. This study points out that salespeople are selling value rather
than the products or services themselves, which are only enablers in
realizing business benefits. Therefore, our findings suggest that
promoting and easing open discourse is an essential part of a
successful sales encounter. A better understanding of how
salespeople and customers successfully interact would help
salespeople to develop their interpersonal sales skills.
Abstract: Electronic Word-Of-Mouth (eWOM) communities
represent today an important source of information in which more
and more customers base their purchasing decisions. They include
thousands of reviews concerning very different products and services
posted by many individuals geographically distributed all over the
world. Due to their massive audience, eWOM communities can help
users to find the product they are looking for even if they are less
popular or rare. This is known as the long tail effect, which leads to a
larger number of lower-selling niche products. This paper analyzes
the long tail effect in a well-known eWOM community and defines a
tool for finding niche products unavailable through conventional
channels.
Abstract: Customer churn prediction is one of the most useful
areas of study in customer analytics. Due to the enormous amount
of data available for such predictions, machine learning and data
mining have been heavily used in this domain. There exist many
machine learning algorithms directly applicable for the problem of
customer churn prediction, and here, we attempt to experiment on
a novel approach by using a cognitive learning based technique in
an attempt to improve the results obtained by using a combination
of supervised learning methods, with cognitive unsupervised learning
methods.
Abstract: Offering a Product-Service System (PSS) is a
well-accepted strategy that companies may adopt to provide a set of
systemic solutions to customers. PSSs were initially provided in a
simple form but now take diversified and complex forms involving
multiple services, products and technologies. With the growing
interest in the PSS, frameworks for the PSS development have been
introduced by many researchers. However, most of the existing
frameworks fail to examine various relations existing in a complex
PSS. Since designing a complex PSS involves full integration of
multiple products and services, it is essential to identify not only
product-service relations but also product-product/ service-service
relations. It is also equally important to specify how they are related
for better understanding of the system. Moreover, as customers tend to
view their purchase from a more holistic perspective, a PSS should be
developed based on the whole system’s requirements, rather than
focusing only on the product requirements or service requirements.
Thus, we propose a framework to develop a complex PSS that is
coordinated fully with the requirements of both worlds. Specifically,
our approach adopts a multi-domain matrix (MDM). A MDM
identifies not only inter-domain relations but also intra-domain
relations so that it helps to design a PSS that includes highly desired
and closely related core functions/ features. Also, various dependency
types and rating schemes proposed in our approach would help the
integration process.
Abstract: MSMEs are regarded as the sunrise sector of the
Indian economy in view of its large potential for growth and likely
socio economic impact specifically on employment and income
generation. In today’s competitive business environment, global
competition forces companies to continuously seek ways of
improving their products and services. The pressure on organizations
to adapt to new technologies and external threats requires
resourcefulness, creativity and innovation. Market has become more
open, competitive and customers more demanding. Without
continuous technology innovation, no organization can ever remain
competitive. Innovations reflect a critical way in which organizations
respond to either technological or market challenges. The need of the
market is to deliver high quality products through continuous
changing in features in product, improve existing products, reduce
their cost, and improve employee skills, training, technology
infrastructure and financial policies. Therefore, the key factor of
organization’s ability to change is innovation. The study presents a
detailed review of literature on the role of technology innovation in
improving manufacturing performance of industries.
Abstract: The paper deals with behaviour of the segment 50+ in
the financial market in the Czech Republic. This segment could be
said as the strong market power and it can be a crucial business
potential for financial business units. The main defined objective of
this paper is analysis of the customers´ behaviour of the segment 50-
60 years in the financial market in the Czech Republic and proposal
making of the suitable marketing approach to satisfy their demands in
the area of product, price, distribution and marketing communication
policy. This paper is based on data from one part of primary
marketing research. Paper determinates the basic problem areas as
well as definition of financial services marketing, defining the
primary research problem, hypothesis and primary research
methodology. Finally suitable marketing approach to selected sub
segment at age of 50-60 years is proposed according to marketing
research findings.
Abstract: In this paper, performances of shuffled frog leaping
algorithm was investigated on the stealth laser dicing process. Effect
of problem on the performance of the algorithm was based on the
tolerance of meandering data. From the customer specification it
could be less than five microns with the target of zero microns.
Currently, the meandering levels are unsatisfactory when compared
to the customer specification. Firstly, the two-level factorial design
was applied to preliminarily study the statistically significant effects
of five process variables. In this study one influential process variable
is integer. From the experimental results, the new operating condition
from the algorithm was superior when compared to the current
manufacturing condition.
Abstract: Due to the rapid increase of Internet, web opinion
sources dynamically emerge which is useful for both potential
customers and product manufacturers for prediction and decision
purposes. These are the user generated contents written in natural
languages and are unstructured-free-texts scheme. Therefore, opinion
mining techniques become popular to automatically process customer
reviews for extracting product features and user opinions expressed
over them. Since customer reviews may contain both opinionated and
factual sentences, a supervised machine learning technique applies
for subjectivity classification to improve the mining performance. In
this paper, we dedicate our work is the task of opinion
summarization. Therefore, product feature and opinion extraction is
critical to opinion summarization, because its effectiveness
significantly affects the identification of semantic relationships. The
polarity and numeric score of all the features are determined by
Senti-WordNet Lexicon. The problem of opinion summarization
refers how to relate the opinion words with respect to a certain
feature. Probabilistic based model of supervised learning will
improve the result that is more flexible and effective.
Abstract: Standard processes, similar and limited production
lines, the production of high direct costs will be more accurate than
the use of parts of the traditional cost systems in the literature.
However, direct costs, overhead expenses, in turn, decrease the
burden of increasingly sophisticated production facilities, a situation
that led the researchers to look for the cost of traditional systems of
alternative techniques. Variety cost management approaches for
example Total quality management (TQM), just-in-time (JIT),
benchmarking, kaizen costing, targeting cost, life cycle costs (LLC),
activity-based costing (ABC) value engineering have been
introduced. Management and cost applications have changed over the
past decade and will continue to change. Modern cost systems can
provide relevant and accurate cost information. These methods
provide the decisions about customer, product and process
improvement. The aim of study is to describe and explain the
adoption and application of costing systems in SME. This purpose
reports on a survey conducted during 2014 small and medium sized
enterprises (SME) in Ankara. The survey results were evaluated
using SPSS18 package program.
Abstract: In this paper, we consider the vehicle routing problem
with mixed fleet of conventional and heterogenous electric vehicles
and time dependent charging costs, denoted VRP-HFCC, in which
a set of geographically scattered customers have to be served by a
mixed fleet of vehicles composed of a heterogenous fleet of Electric
Vehicles (EVs), having different battery capacities and operating
costs, and Conventional Vehicles (CVs). We include the possibility
of charging EVs in the available charging stations during the routes
in order to serve all customers. Each charging station offers charging
service with a known technology of chargers and time dependent
charging costs. Charging stations are also subject to operating time
windows constraints. EVs are not necessarily compatible with all
available charging technologies and a partial charging is allowed.
Intermittent charging at the depot is also allowed provided that
constraints related to the electricity grid are satisfied.
The objective is to minimize the number of employed vehicles and
then minimize the total travel and charging costs.
In this study, we present a Mixed Integer Programming Model and
develop a Charging Routing Heuristic and a Local Search Heuristic
based on the Inject-Eject routine with different insertion methods. All
heuristics are tested on real data instances.
Abstract: The distribution networks are often exposed to harmful
incidents which can halt the electricity supply of the customer. In this
context, we studied a real case of a critical zone of the Tunisian
network which is currently characterized by the dysfunction of its
plan of protection. In this paper, we were interested in the
harmonization of the protection plan settings in order to ensure a
perfect selectivity and a better continuity of service on the whole of
the network.
Abstract: This study examines several critical dimensions of eservice
quality overlooked in the existing literature and proposes a
model and instrument framework for measuring customer perceived
e-service quality in the banking sector. The initial design was derived
from a pool of instrument dimensions and their items from the
existing literature review by content analysis. Based on focused
group discussion, nine dimensions were extracted. An exploratory
factor analysis approach was applied to data from a survey of 323
respondents. The instrument has been designed specifically for the
banking sector. Research data was collected from bank customers
who use electronic banking in a developing economy. A nine-factor
instrument has been proposed to measure the e-service quality. The
instrument has been checked for reliability. The validity and sample
place limited the applicability of the instrument across economies and
service categories. Future research must be conducted to check the
validity. This instrument can help bankers in developing economies
like India to measure the e-service quality and make improvements.
The present study offers a systematic procedure that provides insights
on to the conceptual and empirical comprehension of customer
perceived e-service quality and its constituents.
Abstract: It is widely believed that mobile device is a promising technology for lending the opportunity for the third wave of electronic commerce. Mobile devices have changed the way companies do business. Many applications are under development or being incorporated into business processes. In this day, mobile applications are a vital component of any industry strategy.One of the greatest benefits of selling merchandise and providing services on a mobile application is that it widens a company’s customer base significantly.Mobile applications are accessible to interested customers across regional and international borders in different electronic business (e-business) area. But there is a dark side to this success story. The security risks associated with mobile devices and applications are very significant. This paper introduces a broad risk analysis for the various threats, vulnerabilities, and risks in mobile e-business applications and presents some important risk mitigation approaches. It reviews and compares two different frameworks for security assurance in mobile e-business applications. Based on the comparison, the paper suggests some recommendations for applications developers and business owners in mobile e-business application development process.