Internet Banking–An Empirical Investigation of a Trust and Loyalty Model for New Zealand Banks

ABSTRACT

The development of Internet Banking (I-Banking) requires a new recognition of customers' values for building long-term organization-customer relationships in the E-era. A Structural Equation Model was developed and tested in this paper to identify the determinants that influence customers' trust in, and loyalty to, I-Banking in New Zealand. The results indicated that shared value was the most critical factor impacting customers' trust in I-Banking, compared with two other important factors: communication and opportunistic behaviour control. With regards to improving loyalty among I-Bank customers, findings suggest that I-Banking needs to take satisfaction, trust, brand reputation and switching cost seriously. In particular, satisfaction needs to be regarded seriously, as it is the most important factor influencing customers' loyalty. Based on these findings, the paper culminates in recommendations to improve I-Banking services for customers.     

Effect of Customers' and Suppliers' Perceptions of the Market Orientation of Manufacturing Firms on Channel Relationships and Financial Performance

ABSTRACT

This study is designed to investigate the effect of customers' and suppliers' perceptions of the market orientation of manufacturing firms on customers' and suppliers' trust in, cooperative norms in, and satisfaction with the relationship with the manufacturing firm. The findings from a sample of 72 matched sets of suppliers, manufacturing firms and customers in industrial channels in the Netherlands reveal that the perceived market orientation of manufacturing firms engaged in channel partnerships has a positive influence on customers' and suppliers' levels of trust in, cooperative norms in, and satisfaction with the relationship. This study further investigates the effect of the customers' and suppliers' trust in, cooperative norms in, and satisfaction with the relationship on the financial performance of the manufacturing firm. The results reveal that customers' and suppliers' cooperative norms in the relationship positively influence the manufacturing firm's financial performance. Customer's and supplier's trust in and satisfaction with the relationship have no effect on the manufacturing firm's financial performance.     

Competitive Positioning in International Logistics: Identifying a System of Attributes Through Neural Networks and Decision Trees

Abstract

Firms involved in international logistics must develop a system of service attributes that give them a way to be profitable and to satisfy customers' needs at the same time. How customers trade-off these various attributes in forming satisfaction with competing international logistics providers has not been explored well in the literature. This study explores the ocean freight shipping sector to identify the system of attributes that maximizes customers' satisfaction. Data were collected from shipping managers in Singapore using personal interviews to identify the chief concerns in choosing and evaluating ocean freight services. The data were then examined using neural networks and decision trees, among other approaches to identify the system of attributes that is connected with customer satisfaction. The results illustrate the power of these methods in understanding how industrial customers with global operations process attributes to derive satisfaction. Implications are discussed.     

Evidence Supporting the Importance of Brands in Marketing Computer Products

ABSTRACT

For convenience store (c-store) management to be truly customer-focused, they must listen to their customers and provide the products that meet customers' needs. This study investigates one aspect of c-store customer satisfaction, the product mix. The purpose of this paper is to investigate c-store customers' perceptions of product offerings to expand the c-store's product mix and in turn increase customer satisfaction. Fourteen products were examined. Of the fourteen, three were rated very likely to be purchased: postal services, home style meals, and a salad bar. Differences in preference were found between gender and marital status. Men and single customers had higher purchase intentions for the home style meals than women and married customers. Suggestions for future research are provided.     

Analysis of customers' satisfaction with baby products: The moderating role of brand image

The previous experience of customers is assessed by textual reviews and ratings to reflect their levels of satisfaction with the service or product. Online reviews and ratings have played a vital role to assess the performance of the services or the quality of goods. This research explores customers' levels of satisfaction with baby products on Amazon.com through text mining and survey-based methodologies. The moderating role of a brand image is also investigated on the relationship between customers' satisfaction and recommendations to others. Two sources of data were utilized, online reviews from the Amazon portal and responses of the participants on a large-scale survey. The research model is developed based on the factors that were extracted from the text mining approach. Following that, a questionnaire was distributed and the collected data were inspected using Partial Least Squares Structural Equations Modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings revealed that several dimensions have an influential effect on customers' experiences with baby products, among which are comfortableness, material quality, easy use, easy return, design, price, packaging, and size information. In addition, the moderating influence of the brand image on the hypothesis between customers' satisfaction and recommendations to others was significant. By deploying the two-phase methodology, baby product vendors can understand the influential variables in customers' experiences and their impacts on customers’ satisfaction more accurately.     

Does justice affect brand advocacy? Online brand advocacy behaviors as a response to hotel customers’ justice perceptions

This study focuses on customers' information-sharing behavior in the context of online brand advocacy behavior regarding hotel brands. We aim to explain hotel customers' online brand advocacy behavior through three-sided justice evaluations (i.e., justice for employees, justice for the self, and global belief in a just world), and their hotel satisfaction. Hypotheses are tested by using survey data acquired from 688 individuals on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) through partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings show that customers' perceptions of justice for the self positively affect their hotel satisfaction, perceptions of justice for employees and the global belief in a just world positively affect online brand advocacy behavior, and hotel satisfaction also positively affects online brand advocacy behavior. We expand current research efforts on online brand advocacy research and provide theoretical and managerial implications for the development of marketing and management research and practice.     

Investigating Aspects of Customer Satisfaction at the C-Store: The C-Store Product Mix and Image

ABSTRACT

A recent investigation into the convenience store (c-store) product mix called for further research into c-store customers' preferences for additional product offerings and non-c-store shoppers' reasons for not patronizing a c-store. This paper answers that call by investigating a cross-section of c-store customers to identify their perceptions of product offerings to expand the c-store's product mix and in turn increase customer satisfaction. In addition, this study explores c-store non-users' perceptions of the c-store image to understand why they do not patronize c-stores. Fourteen products were examined. Of the fourteen, only one was rated very likely to be purchased: postal services. The top three reasons provided for not patronizing a c-store were (1) inconvenient location, (2) high prices and (3) loyalty to other retailers. Suggestions for future research are provided.     

Revealing travellers’ satisfaction during COVID-19 outbreak: Moderating role of service quality

User-Generated-Content (UGC) has gained increasing attention as an important indicator of business success in the tourism and hospitality sectors. Previous literature has analyzed travelers' satisfaction through quantitative approaches using questionnaire surveys. Another direction of research has explored the dimensions of satisfaction based on online customers' reviews using the machine learning approach. This study aims to present a new method that combines machine learning and survey-based approaches for customers' satisfaction analysis during the COVID-19 outbreak. In addition, we investigate the moderating role of service quality on the relationship between hotels' performance criteria and customers' satisfaction. To achieve this, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was used for textual data analysis, k-means was used for data segmentation, dimensionality reduction approach was used for the imputation of the missing values, and fuzzy rule-based was used for the prediction of satisfaction level. Following that, a survey-based approach was used to validate the research model by distributing the questionnaire and analyzing the collected data using the Structural Equation Modeling technique. The result of this research presents important contributions from the methodological and practical perspectives in the context of customers' satisfaction in tourism and hospitality during the COVID-19 outbreak. The outcomes of this research confirm the significant influence of the quality of services during the COVID-19 crisis on the relationship between hotel services and travellers’ satisfaction.     

Exploring the Effectiveness of Business Gifts: Replication and Extension

Abstract

This investigation replicates Beltramini's (1992) study of the effectiveness of business gifts, and extends the research to include actual marketplace sales response. A company's customers'perceived satisfaction and intention to continue repurchasing are surveyed both before and after being sent a more expensive gift, a less expensive gift, or no gift at all, and customers'actual sales are longitudinally tracked. The results indicate business gift-giving represents an effective part of a marketer's overall marketing communications strategy, and both limitations and implications are discussed.     

Customer Channel Preferences in the Finnish Banking Sector

Abstract

This research examined a survey of 3,000 and indepth interviews of 30 financial customers who provided information regarding their usage of, and attitudes towards, financial distribution channels. Improvements in technology are facilitating the development of alternative delivery methods and channels, and this paper examines the implications both for customers and for banks. This study looks at customers' behavior and links it with their usage of financial distribution channels to determine if there are particular behavioral segments of customers who exhibit similar patterns of access to financial services. This should enable financial institutions to more efficiently market their delivery of financial services.     

Genetically Modified Foods

ABSTRACT

This study outlines the controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and how it impacts North American based food service companies' marketing policies. Recent developments have made foods derived from GMOs a strategic marketing challenge for food service franchise and chain operations. Headlines such as “Why McDonalds Pulled Frankenfries from Menus” have unwittingly put restaurants on the frontline of the battle over foods made from GMOs (Martin, 2000). A survey method was used to explore food service operations' views regarding consumer acceptance of GMOs, right to know issues (labeling) and the benefits of GMOs, as well as food service companies' strategic response to this emerging technology. Findings indicate that food service establishments were generally concerned about customer opinions and tend to prefer government mandated labeling of GMOs. They also tend to feel that GMOs offer potential benefits to their industry and that customer concerns may fade over time.     

Avoiding Over-Reliance on a Single Large Customer: The Impact of Technical Capability,Product Development and Alternative Key Customers

ABSTRACT

This study examines three investments that component suppliers can make to circumvent their large customers' ability to achieve significant power advantages. A large scale survey of component suppliers was conducted approximately 12 to 24 months after Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) began flexing their increased purchasing power to demand price reductions and costly design services. The results show that suppliers' technical capability, suppliers' efforts to develop segment-focused products, and supplier investments to build relationships with alternative key customers lessened their large customers'power advantage. The urgency of balancing relationships with large OEMs is illustrated with the finding that customers'power advantage has a strong negative influence on the suppliers'forecast ofc their own performance. In contrast, no relationship between forecasted performance and the level of interdependence between large OEMs and their suppliers was found. The rapid increase of customer power across a broad range of industries has placed many companies in situations similar to the component suppliers investigated in this study. Thus, the outcomes of these suppliers'investments should be of interest to a large audience of managers. The theory used to frame and examine this important managerial situation provides a vantage point that complements the work done by other researchers.     

Measurement of Customer Perceptions of the Retail Bank Service Delivery System

The purpose of this research was to develop measures of concepts related to retail bank customers' perceptions of retail bank services delivery systems. The results of the research indicate four potentially important aspects of the retail bank services delivery system are (1) general bank personal service, (2) teller personal service, (3) reactton capacity , and (4) location convenience. The research results support the hypotheses that retail bank customers' perceptions of these issues may be related to customer satisfaction and intentions to do business with the bank in the future, intentions to purchase additional products and services, and intentions to give the bank a larger percentage of the customer's business.     

Big social data and customer decision making in vegetarian restaurants: A combined machine learning method

Customers increasingly use various social media to share their opinion about restaurants service quality. Big data collected from social media provides a data platform to improve the service quality of restaurants through customers' online reviews, where online reviews are a trustworthy and reliable source that helps consumers to evaluate food quality. Developing methods for effective evaluation of customer-generated reviews of restaurant services is important. This study develops a new method through effective learning techniques for customer segmentation and their preferences prediction in vegetarian friendly restaurants. The method is developed through text mining (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), cluster analysis (Self Organizing Map) and predictive learning technique (Classification and Regression Trees) to reveal the customer’ satisfaction levels from the service quality in vegetarian friendly restaurants. Based on the obtained results of our experiments on the data vegetarian friendly restaurants in Bangkok, the models constructed by Classification and Regression Trees were able to give an accurate prediction of customers' preferences on the basis of restaurants' quality factors. The results showed that customers’ online reviews analysis can be an effective way for customers segmentation to predict their preferences and help the restaurant managers to set priority instructions for service quality improvements.     

Food or Medicine?

Abstract

Functional foods offer consumers a range of products that contain modified ingredients to treat specific diseases. The value of this product category has grown considerably since its introduction over a decade ago. This paper reports on qualitative research conducted into the choice criteria used for functional foods. It then compares these to the categories outlined in Khan's food choice model (1981) in order to determine whether functional foods should be treated as a food choice purchase. The findings of this research show that functional food can be treated as a food purchase because most of the choice influences found can be categorised into Khan's conceptualisation. However, additions and redefinitions are suggested. A separate category for family influence was found, as was the requirement to redefine “nutrition” within the model to accommodate the curative benefits of functional foods.     

Predicting satisfaction and intentions to use online food delivery: What really makes a difference?

ABSTRACT

Online food delivery (OFD) is no longer a new concept for the majority of Americans. Large food delivery companies make millions in revenues and those numbers are expected to increase. This study was conducted to investigate customer intentions to use OFD services through the evaluation of satisfaction, food quality, and OFD service quality. The OFD service quality was assessed via e-SELFQUAL dimensions, and included perceived control, service convenience, customer service, and service fulfillment. The study determined that food quality, control, customer service, and service fulfillment affect customer satisfaction in online food delivery services. Customer satisfaction showed a strong positive impact on behavioral intentions to use OFD.     

Perceived Importance Factors of Restaurants in Relation to University Customers' Demographic Characteristics

Abstract

This research examines the attributes which influence customers' decisions to return to a restaurant for another meal. Quality of food was rated as the most important attribute, followed by quality of service, cost/value of the meal, and ambiance of the restaurant. Nutritional value was rated as the least important attribute. Male customers did not rate the attributes differently from the female customers.     

The Relative Effects of Relationship Quality and Exchange Satisfaction on Customer Loyalty

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses two key questions on how supplier firms can better manage industrial buyers to create higher loyalty. The first involves whether to focus on relationship quality or exchange satisfaction. This dual route model towards enhancing loyalty in essence is concerned with comparing the relative strengths of the effect from relationship quality to loyalty and from exchange satisfaction to loyalty. The second point of interest pertains to whether the effects from relationship quality and exchange satisfaction to loyalty are moderated by environmental conditions such as switching barriers and viable alternatives. Using data on business customers' ratings of a major information technology provider, we find that the effect of exchange satisfaction on loyalty is significantly greater than the effect of relationship quality on loyalty. We also find that the impact of exchange satisfaction on loyalty is less sensitive and more stable across different levels of switching barriers and viable alternatives. Conversely, the effect of relationship quality on loyalty is more pronounced to such moderating variables in that the effect of relationship quality on loyalty was greater when switching barriers were low and many viable alternatives existed. Implications for marketing theory and practice are discussed.     

Quantitative analyses of depth interviews

Prior research has relied on qualitative analyses of customers' responses during depth interviews. This article discusses how observational monitoring, subjective encoding, and automatic encoding can be used to quantitatively analyze depth interview data. It compares the benefits and costs of each method, and discusses computer software packages that assist in automatically encoding verbal data. In an innovative experiment, we compared observational monitoring and automatic encoding of customers' responses to open-ended questions about telecommunication services. We conclude that automatic encoding is a feasible method of analyzing depth interviews that provides detailed quantitative information about customers' responses.     

The Impact of “Encouragement” in the Development of Professionals for the Non-Profit Service Sector

Abstract

This study examines the role of perceived intent in the context of penalty evaluation. Based on prior attribution research, the study proposes that customers' responses to penalties are different depending on their perceptions of the organization's intent of using penalties. Using the data collected across the service industry, the study shows that when customers perceive the organization's intent as defensive rather than offensive, their evaluations of the penalty and the organization (e.g., perceived justice, satisfaction, behavioral intentions) are more positive than when they do not. Managerial implications are offered.