The Effect of Low‐ versus High‐Variance in Product Reviews on Product Evaluation

This research investigates whether the effect of low‐ versus high‐variance product reviews on the evaluation of a product about which consumers have favorable or unfavorable prior expectation can vary depending on product type, the argument quality of product reviews, and the number of reviewers. The data across three laboratory experiments demonstrate that high‐variance product reviews are more likely than low‐variance product reviews to undermine product evaluation when consumers have unfavorable prior expectation about a product. When consumers have favorable prior expectation, however, high‐variance product reviews can enhance or undermine product evaluation depending on product category, the argument quality of reviews, and the number of reviewers. The findings are explained by the type of causal attribution consumers make, such that high‐variance product reviews can allow consumers to make biased product evaluation consistent with their prior expectation when the causes of variance in the product reviews are attributed to the reviewers rather than to the product. However, when the causes of variance are attributed to the product rather than the reviewers, high‐variance product reviews can undermine product evaluation regardless of the favorability of prior expectation.     

Development of methodology for classification of user experience (UX) in online customer review

In e-commerce, customer feedback has become an essential source of insight into a product or service's user experience (UX). The study of UX helps to integrate customers' potential needs into the product's design. Because customer reviews in e-commerce are not structured and categorized, it is necessary to analyze UX based on customer opinions systematically. This study tries to structure UX in a product's positive/negative context through a neural network-based self-organizing map (SOM). As a result of analyzing 10,482 reviews on wireless earbuds in BestBuy, an electronic product e-commerce platform, it was confirmed that it is a suitable method for categorizing user experiences between reviews and deriving important factors. In particular, the difference in core UX elements by positive/negative context of the product was verified based on the star rating. The results of this study are expected to contribute to product improvement and business improvement that reflect customer needs by companies or designers who design products for end-users.     

The effect of negative online customer reviews on brand equity and purchase intention of consumer electronics in South Africa

This study investigated the effect that negative online customer reviews have on brand equity and purchase intention. This research examined the influence of negative electronic word of mouth (eWOM) on brand equity, as influenced by customer review quality, product involvement and source credibility. A 3 (high quality review versus low quality review versus no review) × 2 (high product involvement versus low product involvement) factorial experiment with 236 respondents was conducted. The results revealed that the presence of negative eWOM has a significant detrimental effect on brand equity and purchase intention. Furthermore, the effect of negative online customer reviews is more detrimental to the brand equity of a high involvement product than a low involvement product. The results also revealed that high quality reviews are more influential than low quality reviews with respect to brand equity, and the difference between the levels of eWOM source credibility has no significant effect on brand equity.     

Modelling and Investigating the relationship of after sales service quality with customer satisfaction,retention and loyalty – A case study of home appliances business

After sales services (ASS) are activities that take place after the purchase of the product by customers and are devoted to supporting customers in the use and disposal of goods. ASS can create sustainable relationships with customers and contribute significantly to customer satisfaction. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the ASS quality by measuring the level of customer satisfaction (CS), customer retention (CR) and customer loyalty (CL) through the SERVQUAL dimensions comprising of ASS attributes and also to check which such ASS-based dimensions of SERVQUAL needs to be focused more on improving the quality of ASS with the consideration of firms involved in manufacturing the home appliances. For this purpose research models were proposed to examine the influence of ASS attributes on CS, CR and CL for three different products such as Gas Stove, Water Purifier and Mixer Grinder from the home appliances sector and tested by multiple regression analyses on data collected through the structured survey questionnaire, with a five-point Likert scale. The study has demonstrated the application of multiple regression analysis in studying the influence of ASS attributes on CS, CR and CL, and the results of the study have helped in analysing the performance of the case companies so as to devise suitable strategies in improving CS, CR and CL.     

Text mining approach to explore determinants of grocery mobile app satisfaction using online customer reviews

In recent years, there has been proliferation of grocery mobile apps as grocery shopping on mobile has found increasing acceptance among customers accelerated by multiple factors. Maintaining high level of customer satisfaction is important for grocery mobile apps in the highly competitive app market. Online reviews have been a rich source of information to analyze customer satisfaction with a product or service. This paper explores the determinants of customer satisfaction for grocery mobile apps using online reviews. Latent Dirichlet Analysis (LDA), which is a text mining technique, is used to analyze online customer reviews of 27,337 customers to identify determinants of customer satisfaction. The determinants identified were further analyzed using a series of analysis to understand the importance of each determinant. Dominance analysis examined the relative importance of the determinants of customer satisfaction based on the overall rating. Correspondence analysis identified determinants which cause satisfaction separately from the determinants which cause dissatisfaction. The results from this study will provide insights to business managers of grocery mobile apps for decision-making on customer satisfaction management.     

Share of wallet in retailing: the effects of customer satisfaction, loyalty cards and shopper characteristics

In retailing, consumers typically patronize multiple outlets. Thus, an important issue is why consumers vary in how they divide their purchases across outlets and how outlets can get a greater share of consumer expenditures. Two potential avenues for increasing customer share are to raise customer satisfaction, and increase repeat purchase through loyalty cards. This study examines the effects of customer satisfaction and loyalty cards as well as consumer characteristics on customer share spent on the primary grocery store. The findings suggest that customer satisfaction has a positive, albeit modest, effect on share while consumer economic shopping orientation has a negative direct effect on share. The economic orientation of shoppers, their felt importance of a personal relationship with store personnel, and the level of their aggregate purchase volume moderate the effect of satisfaction on customer share. Finally, the results provide mixed support for the impact of loyalty cards on customer behavior.     

How Online Product Reviews Affect Retail Sales: A Meta-analysis

A growing body of research has emerged on online product reviews and their ability to elicit performance outcomes desired by retailers; yet, a common understanding of the performance implications of online product reviews has eluded us. Scholars continue to navigate an array of studies assessing different design elements of online product reviews, and various research settings and data sources. We undertake a meta-analysis of 26 empirical studies yielding 443 sales elasticities to examine how these variables relate to retail sales. Building on well-established meta-analytical methods, we address the following questions: How does review valence influence the elasticity of retailer sales? What about review volume? For which product types and usage situations do online product reviews have a greater impact on retailer sales elasticity? Which types of online reviewers and websites exert the greatest influence on retailer sales elasticity? Our study answers these important questions and provides a much needed quantitative synthesis of this burgeoning stream of research.     

Does managing customer accounts receivable impact customer relationships,and sales performance? An empirical investigation

The impact of accounts receivables on the performance of salespersons is largely ignored in sales literature. However, in many sales contexts, managing customers' accounts receivables is directly managed by the salespeople, and therefore substantially impacts their sales performance. Towards such sales contexts, in this empirical study, we study the effect of customer account receivables and salespersons' customer orientation on their relationship orientation and customer-related performance. We further analyse the direct impact of relationship orientation on customer-related performance. Using survey-based data from 224 salespersons based out of India, we empirically test the proposed model using partial least squares structural equation modelling. Our findings suggest that accounts receivables from customers and salespersons ‘customer orientation strongly impact relationship building and also improves customer-related performance. The salespersons’ relationship orientation also partially mediates the relationship between customer account receivables and customer-related performance. Therefore, this study provides much-required evidence to establish the salience of salesforce appropriately managing customers' account receivables so that its impact on their sales performance customer relationships are not adversely affected.     

Comparing email and SNS users: Investigating e-servicescape,customer reviews,trust, loyalty and E-WOM

For better or worse, satisfied or dissatisfied customers function as trusted branding faces for organizations as they transmit potentially viral messages through E-WOM. These E-WOM messages can prove marketers' best friends or worst enemies, depending on their tenor. With data from actual customers of an e-tailer, this research enriches our understanding of how e-servicescape is linked to E-WOM. E-servicescape captures the online environmental factors of marketers’ websites. Two forms of E-WOM are examined; i.e., emails and social network postings. Customer reviews were investigated as a prospective sub-dimension of e-servicescape. Findings suggest that customer reviews play an integral role in the e-servicescape construct, that e-servicescape positively impacts trust and that trust positively influences E-WOM and customer loyalty. Two groups of customers were compared, and results indicated differences between email and SNS users. Theoretical and managerial insights related to E-WOM and electronic commerce shopping behavior were generated.     

A detailed behavioral analysis on consumer and customer changing behavior with respect to social networking sites

The main purpose of the study is to analyze the changing behavior of the customers on various products by conducting a customer review. The analysis is performed in three major steps such as, calculating customer review quality, calculating behavior quality of customer and review comparison. Behavioral analysis is a kind of science which helps to study and understand the behavior of human beings. It studies the factors that influence the behavior of living beings and non-living beings on a larger aspect. A special emphasis is placed on understanding, describing, predicting and changing behavior. Understanding the behavior of individuals is a tedious job to be performed and hence to evaluate the final result, the study used Chi-Square Method. As a tool, the paper employs customer reviews to gather primary and secondary data. These reviews inform, educate and explain the benefits of using customer reviews in gathering data. It is one of the best and easiest methods to formulate the score of comparison between customer's profile and their review. Findings of the study proved that depending on the customer's profile, the quality of the product varied. Furthermore, high rates of efficiency and accuracy is observed in gathering information on the products via customer's profile and review. Study authenticates an inclusive approach to explain factors manipulating consumer awareness, observation and sensitivity on product value. A depth analysis was carried out to identify the purchase decision, brand behavior, price influence the buying behavior and opinion of the customers. However, the factors such as high quality, social media networking sites and customer's profiles had a greater impact on buying behavior of the customers.     

Why should I believe this? Deciphering the qualities of a credible online customer review

Online customer reviews have been shown to have a powerful impact on the sales of a given product or service. However, the qualities of a ‘credible’ online customer review are still subject to debate. Existing research has highlighted the potential influence of a range of factors on the credibility of an online customer review, but relies heavily on quantitative methods and a ‘top down’ approach. In turn, this can reduce our understanding of the influence of these factors into merely discerning whether one pre-determined factor is more influential than another is. This paper adopted a ‘bottom up’ thematic analysis of individual qualitative interviews with a purposeful sample of consumers who regularly utilised online customer reviews. The findings uncovered a range of factors that influenced the credibility of an online customer review that were attached to a reader’s personal experience and to the content of a specific review, and inferred the existence of a reciprocal relationship between the constructs of review helpfulness and review credibility.     

Actual consumers' response to purchase refurbished smartphones: Exploring perceived value from product reviews in online retailing

Refurbishing is an industrial process whereby used products are returned to good working condition to extend lifespan. As smartphones are short life cycle products replaced at an increasing rate, refurbishing is one of the end-of-life strategies to recover value from used smartphones. Chief among the factors given for refurbishing success is consumers' perception of the aspects of the purchase toward these products. This research investigates the significant factors in consumer perceived value about purchasing refurbished smartphones. Online product reviews are recognized as a promising data source to evaluate consumers' post-purchase behaviour in the actual market. Accordingly, a customer satisfaction model of online refurbished smartphone reviews from e-commerce websites is presented to explore customer satisfaction dimensions (CSDs) toward refurbished smartphones. The results indicate that product characteristics, including function, which is related to satisfactory working, appearance, which is the same as no scratches on body and screen, and battery health, are the most worrying feature of refurbished smartphones that consumers have mentioned. Besides, we find that the similarity of these products to brand new ones and their lower prices are the main reason and motivation for purchasing. The results also show that the perceived value of refurbished smartphones is found as a two-dimensional structure based on perceived incentive and quality and perceived benefit and risk. Eventually, some solutions propose to improve customer perceptions and reduce the misconception of refurbishment concept, which can be used by refurbishers and marketing managers for proper product development and marketing strategies.     

时间间隔何时能够提高在线评论的有用性感知——基于归因理论的视角

文章从归因理论的视角出发,探索了购买与评论间的时间间隔与产品类型（物质性产品Vs体验性产品）如何相互作用以影响评论的有用性感知。通过将产品分为物质性产品和体验性产品,文章运用实验检验了时间间隔对不同产品类型的评论影响作用产生的不同作用。结果表明,对于体验型产品来说,时间间隔近（Vs远）可以提高评论的有用性感知;而对于物质型产品来说,时间间隔近（Vs远）可以降低评论的有用性感知。除此之外,实验结果也证实归因倾向中介于时间间隔与评论有用性感知。但是时间间隔对评论有用性的影响还会受到评论效价的调节,时间间隔只会改变正面评论的有用性感知,但是并不能显著影响负面评论。研究结论有助于深入理解阅读者对在线评论的有用性判断的反应,并为在线零售商提供了一个更好利用和维护在线产品评论提高新的视角。     

Experiential goods with network externalities effects: An empirical study of online rating system

This paper uses online users' reviews and sales information from May 2003 to March 2007 to study a new experiential product: online video game (or virtual world). The results suggest that, first of all, for a hedonic product such as an online video game, the availability of online review system could not fully transform experience attributes into search attributes. The empirical study confirms that negative word-of-mouth has more significant impact than positive reviews. The study empirically verifies that the existence of direct network externalities (i.e. a product's value increases when more consumers join the network) is crucial for a hedonic product. The size of the user base signals the quality of the game, and works like a search attribute for potential users. A large user base will reduce the negative impact from unfavorable reviews.     

Customer showrooming behavior,customer orientation,and emotional labor: Sales control as a moderator

Despite the popularity of customer showrooming behavior (CSB), few studies have investigated how this phenomenon affects salespeople's sales behavior. To answer this research call, we explored the effect of CSB on customer orientation (CO), as they are associated with emotional labor (EL) and perceived sales control as a moderator. We gathered data from 397 salespeople in South Korean department stores. Our study showed that CSB affected deep acting negatively by reducing CO. Perceived outcome-based sales control enhances CSB's negative impact on CO. Nevertheless, perceived behavior-based sales control does not moderate the relationship between CSB and CO. Our results indicate that supervising salespeople using outcome-based control only worsens the effect of CSB on salespeople who combat CSB.     

The Role of Emotions for the Perceived Usefulness in Online Customer Reviews

Online customer reviews often express emotions. This can enable marketers to analyze the textual content of online reviews with the aim to understand the role of emotions and how they can affect other customers. In this paper, we present an approach to extracting emotion content from online reviews in order to measure the importance of various emotion dimensions within different product categories. The approach uses an emotion lexicon to extract emotion terms, while it also builds a classification model to measure the importance of emotion dimensions based on the quality of reviews. Review quality is measured based on the usefulness of online customer reviews, which are perceived and evaluated by other customers through their helpfulness ratings. This approach allows the identification of emotion dimensions that characterize qualitative reviews. The empirical evaluation in our study suggests that trust, joy, and anticipation are the most decisive emotion dimensions, although substantial variance across product categories can also be detected. Additionally, we compared two contrasting emotion dictionaries. One lexicon was crowd-funded and contained a large vocabulary, whereas the other was more focused and smaller, since it was created word-wise by an expert. Our empirical findings indicate that the crowd-funded solution outperforms its smaller counterpart in terms of classification precision. The main implication of this study is that it adds an emotional perspective to the broad set of existing tools that marketers employ to analyzing online reviews. Our contributions are: i) we are the first to analyze emotions' role in online customer reviews; ii) we demonstrate how to develop a big data model such as this, without external assistance; iii) we show how to interpret the results of the created model; and iv) we show which dictionary to prefer when creating the model.     

Short-term and long-term effects of touchpoints on customer perceptions

Recent literature highlights the importance of touchpoints, yet fails to test empirically their long-term effects on essential customer perceptions. This study assesses the short- and long-term impacts of different provider-controlled touchpoints on firm expertise, service reliability and service excellence. A random panel dataset of more than 2,000 customers over five years is used to test the proposed model. The results confirm that sales force and product are crucial for long-term customer perceptions, while the effect of consulting, tangibles and standardized contacts is weaker over time. The findings of this managerial-oriented study reveal how the effectiveness of touchpoints changes over time.     

Addressing negative product attribute reviews: The case of advertising product attributes and corporate social responsibility information

Negative product reviews are bad for businesses. They can adversely affect product sales, brand evaluations, and brand loyalty. To attend to negative reviews, one approach is through advertising products or company virtues. The current study examines the efficacy of different advertising approaches (core product attribute advertising vs. non-core product attribute advertising vs. corporate social responsibility [CSR] advertising) in helping dilute the negative effect of dissimilar negative product attribute reviews (negative core product attribute reviews vs. negative non-core product attribute reviews). Through four experiments, we found that when the non-core attribute of a product had negative reviews, a core attribute advertising approach weakened the effect of negative reviews. However, CSR advertising was less effective. Furthermore, when the core attributes of a product had negative reviews, a non-core attribute advertising effort did not weaken, but actually augmented the impact of negative reviews. In addition, when the core attributes of a product received negative reviews, CSR advertising decreased the influence of negative reviews. Our findings provide theoretical and managerial implications for managing negative online reviews of product attributes.     

Impact of Sales Call Adaptiveness and Customer Willingness on Sales Call Length: A Cross-Country Study of India,China, Korea,and Philippines

ABSTRACT

In this empirical study across four countries (India, China, Korea, and Philippines), we examine the impact of sales call adaptiveness and customer willingness on sales call length (duration) of salespersons in these four countries. Sales call length as well as sales call quality—although important constructs in sales—are still underresearched in the domain of sales management. Our study in these four emerging markets sheds new light on enhancing sales force effectiveness. Using survey data from 847 salespersons in four countries, we analyze using multivariate analysis, and our results suggest that sales force effectiveness can be enhanced by giving them the autonomy to decide the sales call length based on the prospect quality. We also demonstrate that salespeople indulging in sales-oriented behaviors may be detrimental to the long-term relationship with customers. Emphasis on relational sales approaches would reduce sales practices such as pitching products or services to unwilling customers. Our study also highlights the interactive role of customer willingness and sales adaptiveness. We found several inter-country differences across sales practices in four countries, which have several meaningful managerial implications.     

Do Mystery Shoppers Really Predict Customer Satisfaction and Sales Performance?

Mystery shopping (MS) is a widely used tool to monitor the quality of service and personal selling. In consultative retail settings, assessments of mystery shoppers are supposed to capture the most relevant aspects of salespeople’s service and sales behavior. Given the important conclusions drawn by managers from MS results, the standard assumption seems to be that assessments of mystery shoppers are strongly related to customer satisfaction and sales performance. However, surprisingly scant empirical evidence supports this assumption. We test the relationship between MS assessments and customer evaluations and sales performance with large-scale data from three service retail chains. Surprisingly, we do not find a substantial correlation. The results show that mystery shoppers are not good proxies for real customers. While MS assessments are not related to sales, our findings confirm the established correlation between customer satisfaction measurements and sales results.