A meta-narrative of consumer journeys in access-based consumption: a case of fashion rentals

PurposeService failure and recovery encounters are often witnessed by other customers, but little is known about how these encounters impacts other customers. With an aim to bridge this gap, the purpose of the paper is to explore why and how service recovery directed at a focal customer impacts other customers who are present in the same service environment.Design/methodology/approachThe paper follows a qualitative research methodology. Purposive sampling was used to collect data from 30 customers through semi-structured face-to-face interviews. The data was analysed using thematic analysis.FindingsFindings of the study show that service recovery directed at a focal customer has an impact on other customers' fairness judgments, emotions, service quality perceptions and behaviour. Other customers' behavioural reactions in response to observed service recovery are driven by two different motives: self-interest and moral obligation. Observing customers' cautious behaviour and (re)purchase behaviour are found to be primarily driven by self-interest, whereas their helping behaviour, punishment behaviour and word-of-mouth behaviour are found to be driven by moral obligation.Research limitations/implicationsThis study findings contribute to theory development on “other-oriented” effects of service recovery and provides valuable insights for effective management of service failures in the shared service environment.Originality/valueThis is the first study, which qualitatively explores the “other customers” perspective of service recovery in the context of shared servicescape.

As the use of mobile devices increases, social media and online reviews are increasingly important in the spread of WOM and play an important role in consumer decisions and the consumer journey. Companies can take advantage of online reviews in the form of User-Generated Reviews (UGR) and Influencer-Generated Reviews (IGR) to improve marketing strategies. This study aims to determine which online review is more effective between user-generated and influencer-generated reviews. The authors use experiments to examine how the type of online review (UGR vs IGR) influences consumers' perceptions of reviews and purchase intentions. This study predicts differences between the two online reviews influencing consumer purchase intentions. This research used an experimental design, and primary data collection was carried out with a web-based questionnaire. This study found that influencer-generated reviews were more effective in influencing purchase intentions. Interestingly, this is due to a process in which consumers assume IGR is more effortful to craft and subsequently equate this greater perceived effort with the credibility of the review and leading to more persuasive, in effect, purchase intention. Given the increasing use of mobile devices, social media, and the increasingly important online reviews (UGR and IGR) in the spread of WOM, this research contributes to understanding consumer decision-making processes and journeys when processing online reviews.

Academia and industry widely believe that merchants’ customized response is an indispensable tool for handling online reviews, particularly negative reviews caused by service failures. However, whether merchants actually fulfill the promises they make in their responses remains unclear. On the basis of the literature on online reviews and service recovery, this study utilizes a series of textual features of online reviews and merchant responses via text analysis, including review topics, review sentiments, and response pertinence, to construct a novel indicator. This indicator, the consistency between merchants’ words and deeds (hereafter referred to as CWD), can be used to infer the degree of merchant response fulfillment. In particular, this study first proposes two indicators, namely, response and action levels, and then measures their difference to evaluate the CWD level of merchants. CWD can reflect the effort exerted by merchants to achieve service recovery. This study significantly contributes to the literature on service recovery and online reviews. The research findings derived from this study can help urge merchants to provide consumers with improved products and services. They can also be applied to the online ranking system to enhance platform fairness and protect the long-term interests of consumers and other stakeholders.

Mapping the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) research: A systematic review and bibliometric analysis

The study identified service recovery and the level of retention among bank customers in Ekiti State, Nigeria. The study embraced a descriptive survey research. Customers of eight banks like Access Bank, First Bank, Zenith Bank, GTco, Eco Bank, Wema Bank, Heritage Bank and UBA constituted the study population. Two hundred and forty (240) sample size through simple random sampling was employed. Primary data through administration of structured questionnaire to customers of the aforementioned eight banks in Ekiti State was used. The data retrieved were analysed using linear regression. The study found a significant effect of service recovery on customer retention (beta = 930, t= 12.397, P= 0.000 < 0.05) at 0.05 level of significance. In conclusion, service recovery significantly affects customer retention among banks in Ekiti State. The study recommended that bank management or managers should put up a retention strategy through service recovery that will help retain customers and preventing them from switching to other banks.

Building on the justice theory, managerial responses (MRs) to negative online reviews are investigated for their service recovery efficacy. MRs (>2,000) for 106 hotels were analyzed for interactional, procedural, and distributive justice and matched with their property-level room revenue, total revenue, and gross operating profit. Service recovery’s importance was empirically demonstrated via a negative association between negative reviews and performance outcomes and a positive association between MRs and performance outcomes. Justice-based MRs revealed differential impacts on performance outcomes: those with interactional justice were most effective in improving profitability. Findings further highlighted product positioning as a moderator. On one hand, interactional justice worked for lower-positioned hotels by being positively associated with total revenue. On the other hand, distributive justice backfired by being negatively associated with total revenue, suggesting that compensation in service recovery does not necessarily add value.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a theoretical perspective on customer retention activities associated with service failure management and service recovery as a means to retain customers in the hotel industry - and to improve the competitiveness of a hotel. The research is pursued with the following objectives in mind: To determine the customer retention activities involved in the service failure management needed by hotels to retain customers. To determine the customer retention activities associated with the service recovery that hotels might perform in order to retain customers. Design/methodology/approach: Secondary sources such as textbooks, scientific journals, and previous studies on the subject were used to obtain relevant background information. A literature search of secondary sources was conducted to elucidate questions and areas of enquiry that relate to the research. Findings: The theoretical perspectives on service failure management and service recovery provided in this paper suggest several customer retention activities that might be used by hotels in order to manage service failure and service recovery - and thus become more competitive. Implications: This paper suggests a number of approaches that hotel managers might take to improve service failure management and service recovery. Such activities could assist a hotel in determining where it is lacking and where to improve its performance in these areas. These activities could provide guidance to managers who are dealing with the day-to-day operations of a hotel. They might help to avoid service failures in the first place, and, secondly, to give ideas about service recovery if failures do occur. On a more strategic level, these activities could also assist managers to develop a general customer retention strategy that incorporates service failure management and service recovery. Originality/value: Service failure management and service recovery are viewed as ways to retain customers and to improve the competitiveness of hotels. Service failure and service recovery activities are proposed; these might form part of a framework for customer retention management for the hotel industry in Gauteng, South Africa. Such a framework has not been attempted before. The paper discusses the environment in which hotels find themselves, provides a theoretical background to service failure and service recovery, and suggests strategies that could be put in place by hotels in order to retain customers. Managers of private or owner-managed - or of group or branded hotels - could perform these activities and thus improve their effectiveness.

Human capital is vital for any organization for the attainment of organizational objectives. Developing the human capital thus becomes a critical conduit to the attainment of organizational objective. There has been an increase in the number of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Zimbabwe and human resource management has become very critical. The human resource is the only resource that can provide competitive advantage amongst rivals. This paper seeks to highlight the challenges faced by small and medium enterprises in effectively implementing human capital development (HCD). Qualitative research methodology was used as the main research approach in the study. Two small and two medium mining organisations were conveniently identified in Gweru and used as case studies. Data was gathered mainly through the use of face to face interviews with 12 participants. It was obtained that both small and medium enterprises view human capital development as very important in their operations. However they pointed out that they cannot employ HCD effectively as they have limited financial resources, lack of skilled staff, lack of expert knowledge on human resource issues as well as lack of effective employee retention strategies. The researcher recommends that the small and medium enterprises forms partnerships with other organisations so as to mobilise resource and also for knowledge sharing.

The aim of this study was to analyse the content of online reviews posted by hospital employees on job websites for themes of organisational culture. 103 anonymous online reviews across three job websites, posted by hospital employees of four hospitals within an Australian health network were extracted. Reviews had been posted across a period of six years, from 2014 to early 2020. Sentiment rating based on user-allotted ratings on the selected websites was calculated. The sentiment score was validated against the textual content of the review to confirm employee recommendation and sentiment. Sentiment was coded as neutral, positive, or negative. Significant keywords, associations, and usage within the context of identified sentiment were deductively coded and clustered manually against eight pre-determined safety culture themes. These themes were derived from the most used assessment tools for self-reported measures of occupational health and safety, and safety culture in healthcare. Workers across clinical roles (n = 49) and non-clinical roles (n = 50) were evenly represented in the dataset. 35.9% of commenters (n = 37) reported their length of employment in the hospitals that they reviewed. Most online employee reviews addressed broad themes related to perceptions of management (n = 98), safety climate (n = 97), teamwork climate (n = 91) and working conditions (n = 98). A significant set of reviews addressed themes related to job satisfaction (n = 49) and learning, training, and development (n = 41). 72.8% of online reviews (n = 75) expressed positive sentiment towards their employer. Reviews expressing negative sentiment were largely posted by former employees and indicated areas of discontent that reflected organisational and systemic factors. Online employee reviews posted by hospital workers on job sites provide valuable insights into healthcare organisational culture. Therefore, employee online reviews could be used as a supplementary source of data to inform organisational employee engagement initiatives.

In today’s rapid development of information technology and big data technology, consumer behavior is undergoing a profound transformation. This study focuses on the decision-making stage of consumer journey, selects indicators based on webpage click stream data, improves the K-means algorithm, and realizes the identification of consumer journey nodes using the binary K-means algorithm. Based on the review recommendation scenario, from the perspective of consumer decision-making journey, we introduce the “attention-attitude-understanding-purchase intention” stage-based decision-making model, apply it to the model design of deep learning, and combine the attention mechanism and co-attention mechanism to propose a product recommendation method based on online reviews. The results show that consumers in clusters 1-4 are in the consumer journey nodes of attention, understanding, attitude, and purchase intention, respectively. The product recommendation model exhibits better recommendation accuracy and time efficiency, with accuracy improved by 18.72%~67.12% and time reduced by 8.39%~62.03% over the comparison method. This paper realizes the innovation of deep learning method with the support of consumer behavior theory, and improves the methodological technical support for accurate online marketing strategy.

Integration of middleware scheduling and resource management services enables open distributed real-time embedded (DRE) applications to meet end-to-end quality of service (QoS) requirements in highly variable operating environments. This paper describes our research on integrating CORBA scheduling and resource management services, and presents experiments we conducted to validate and quantify the benefits of this integration. Our experimental results show that integrating distributed scheduling and resource management in middleware for open DRE systems can offer significant improvements in predictability. Specifically, integrating our stand-alone resource management service with a previously unmanaged experimental baseline application reduced the ratio of missed deadlines from 26% to 10%, and the same application performed even better under the control of integrated scheduling and resource management services, with a missed deadline ratio of only 1%.

PurposeIncreased global air travel and competition in the airline industry entail better service delivery and failure management. This study examines how airline type, failure criticality and the traveller's culture influence travellers' airline evaluations of service failure.Design/methodology/approachThe study uses a large data set of customers' online reviews and incorporates quantitative and qualitative feedback from 20 major airlines across the world. Semantic tagging, sentiment and multivariate analyses have been used to analyse the data.FindingsFailure criticality and travellers' cultural backgrounds significantly affect airline evaluations after service failures. Moreover, failure criticality influences evaluations of travellers from individualistic cultures more severely. Contrary to expectations, full-service airlines were evaluated positively after less critical service failures.Practical implicationsThe findings support that customers undergo different emotional states when they experience service failure. Understanding these internal emotional sensitivities and how services would be judged by travellers across cultures can help airlines to better manage their service recovery efforts and to strategise prioritisation of scarce resources.Originality/valueThough airline service failure has been well researched, this study examines the role of culture in service failure evaluations. The study uses a novel method to analyse a large data set of both quantitative and qualitative traveller feedback useful in service recovery management.

Increasingly, consumers are posting online reviews about hotels, restaurants, and other tourism and hospitality providers. While some managers are responding to these reviews, little is known about how to respond and how to do so effectively. Drawing on the service recovery, justice, and electronic word-of-mouth literatures, we developed a typology of management responses to negative online reviews of hotel accommodation. An initial version of the typology was verified through interviews with eight industry experts. The final “Triple A” typology comprised 19 specific forms of managerial responses subsumed within the three higher-level categories of acknowledgements, accounts, and actions. The typology was tested on a sample of 150 conversations drawn from the website, TripAdvisor. Most responses included an acknowledgement of the dissatisfying event, an account (explanation) for its occurrence, and a reference to action taken. Responses differed between top- and bottom-ranked hotels. Propositions for extending this area of research are provided.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify challenges faced in resource management in the UK construction industry and to propose some solutions to these problems. Design/methodology/approach Based on a qualitative research methodology, 14 experts from the UK construction industry were chosen to be participants in the study. The participants were equally divided into two focus groups to discuss resource management using five projects as case studies. Thematic analysis of the discussion reveals seven key factors that affect resource management. Findings The results show that most of the problems identified are due to poor data management processes and the practice of having data in silos. Overcoming this challenge requires the adoption of big data approaches for resource management to allow the integration of large and different forms of data. Originality/value This study seeks to bring to the fore challenges faced in resource management by the UK construction industry and to outline some solutions to address them.

In mixed-criticality systems, resource management services are required to recognize and fulfill system wide high-level constraints, e.g., end-to-end deadlines. This is not possible through individual resources in isolation. Instead, a system-wide view is necessary which requires system-wide decisions. In the European FP7 project DREAMS, services for system-wide adaptability of mixed-criticality applications consuming several resources are provided via a hierarchical resource management. The resource management is a promising target for a passive as well as an active attacker since it deals with critical information of the system. The fact of having the authority to actively take decisions on resource allocation makes it an interesting target. Therefore, security mechanisms are required to ensure an adequate protection of the system's resource management. This paper introduces the DREAMS secure resource management services, specifically secure communication between the resource managers. Furthermore, the resource management infrastructure is analyzed with respect to possible attacks and suitable countermeasures are discussed. A security library is developed in accordance to the identified countermeasures and implemented as a proof of concept.