Customer Feels Research Articles

Interrupted anticipation after a service failure: The role of olfactory sensation on expected pleasure, taste enjoyment, consumption, and repatronage intentions

When consumers are highly charged with the anticipation of indulging in a pleasurable eating experience, a service failure that threatens to deny them the opportunity to satisfy their appetitive goals produces an “interrupted anticipation.” This study demonstrated that among those whose eager anticipation was interrupted by an unexpected service failure, food aroma tended to reinforce unpleasant feelings and generally negate the positive emotional boost normally expected from a positive olfactory cue. This resulted in significantly lower levels of expected pleasure, taste enjoyment, quantity of food consumed, and repatronage intentions. In contrast, for those whose anticipation was not interrupted, the food aroma exposure significantly enhanced the positivity of the consumer's service experience. When service failures lead to interrupted anticipation, service recovery efforts may sometimes prove to be ineffective in restoring the positive feelings of customers. Implications for theory development and managerial practice are also discussed.

Card bases payment mode - an accounting perspective: a comparison between credit card and debit card payment systems in India

When commerce goes electronic, the means of paying for goods and services must also go electronic. Thus, for electronic commerce it is also necessary to change payment mode from physical to logical. Many businesses accept payment by card for their goods and services and this can undoubtedly offer some distinct advantages as far as accounting and business is concerned. After considering the advantages we should know how other people think of it. So in this study, we conducted a survey to know how an ordinary Indian customer feels about electronic payment so that business houses can make changes in their accounting system to incorporate the customers’ choice. Studies show that followed by the slowdown, Indians continued to spend online in the last quarter of 2008 to emerge as the third highest spenders on the internet in the Asia Pacific region. During the present study, it has been observed that the credit card and debit card payment systems are more common as compared to other modes of electronic payments. Thus in this paper, we are presenting complete information on the credit card and debit card payments and transactions in the last five years and until November 2010 in India.

The dimensionality of fashion‐brand experience

PurposeThis study aims to understand the multifaceted fashion‐brand experience. By identifying the constructs and conceptualizing the building process of fashion‐brand experience, this study also aims to demonstrate the cognitive, affective, and behavioral brand experience dimensions in accordance with the customer‐based brand equity hierarchy. In addition, by comparing two rivaling fashion brands, this study seeks to empirically depict the exclusivity of the Korean apparel market.Design/methodology/approachBased on three studies conducted in South Korea, the fashion‐brand experience scale was validated. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling revealed that the scale consisted of brand awareness, brand performance, brand imagery, customer judgments, customer feelings, and customer‐brand resonance according to cognitive, affective and, behavioral brand experience dimensions. Additionally, the brand effect was controlled by comparing the composition of the two brands.FindingsFashion‐brand experience highlights the robust affective dimension that is created via the relational extension of brand imagery, customer feelings, and customer‐brand resonance. In addition, as a condition necessary for affective experience, the cognitive brand judgment is created by a credible opinion related to brand performance. On a comparison of the disparity of hypothetical relationships between brands, it may be inferred that Polo proffers both cognitive judgments and affective feelings prior to the resonance experience, while Giordano augments the affective experience by engaging exclusive customer feelings.Research limitations/implicationsStructural relationships among six dimensions of brand experience may vary when different product categories and brands are compared. To improve the generalization of empirical findings, varied consumer samples should be employed, and other control effects, such as personal and cultural factors, should be considered.Originality/valueTo provide insight into the transition of a fashion‐brand experience toward the global consumer experience archetype, this study underscores the unique nature and dimensional structure of fashion‐brand experience by theorizing a customer‐based brand equity approach.

Personalized customization in product design using customer attributes and artificial neural network

Increasingly, customers choose products in terms of the experience and enjoyment that the product can bring to them, in addition to functional performance and usability. These experiences involve a range of customer emotional feelings. Correct understanding of customer feelings and subsequently relating them to new product elements or features, are the important issues for a successful design. While this has been addressed by technologies, like kansei engineering, the difficulty remains in handling the differences of an individual kansei. This article proposes the use of artificial neural networks to solve this problem and to explore the relationship between customer attributes and product evaluation. Initial results have established the feasibility and success of this method. It will find application in product design and in particular personalized customization.

A consultation and simulation system for product color planning based on interactive genetic algorithms

In the early stage of a design process, it is important to create numerous and varied possible color plans for the target consumer group. These color plans help individual designers quickly find a few good color design schemes and give the design team ideas for brainstorming. The color plan of a product consists of the color combinations of its components and decorative patterns, which strongly influence the feelings of customers and thus their desire to purchase. However, very few studies have discussed these issues. In this study, a consultation and simulation system for product color planning that helps designers obtain the optimal color planning for components and decorative patterns of a product is proposed. This system includes two parts: one uses the interactive genetic algorithm to establish a creative evolutionary system that can interact with a designer to explore novel design schemes; the other extends the boundary extract algorithm to establish a color simulation system that can apply colors to the areas of product components and decorative patterns for color simulation. Finally, a case study of color planning for a motorcycle model is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed system. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 38, 375–390, 2013

Maximização do letramento em saúde e recordação do cliente em um contexto em desenvolvimento: perspectivas do fonoaudiólogo e do cliente

Health literacy has been studied in several areas, but little discussed in the field of speech-language therapy. In general, the studies include intrinsic factors to the individual, environment and relationship between client and health professional**. In terms of individual factors, patients with communication disorders face greater challenges when they need to apply literacy skills in health, suggesting that the speech-language therapist should be particularly concerned about the health literacy of their clients. In terms of contextual factors, cultural and linguistic barriers and the client’s religious beliefs can determine if the changes needed for health promotion will be held. Relative to the relationship between client and speech-language therapist, if the customer feels inferior in the relationship, he will tend to have a passive attitude in the therapeutic process and will not ask the questions necessary for the understanding of care. According to the authors, the socio-cultural characteristics of South Africa and dialectal variation difficult the widespread of health information and interfere with the relationship between therapist and patient. In conformity with the literature, is consensus among health professionals of the region to provide written information to clients in order to assisting them to manage their own health after the consultations. In this surrounding context, the authors state that there are strategies of high and low technology to promote patient adherence to treatment and to improve understanding of the process. To supplement the reader’s understanding, they have provided in the appendices a framework with advantages and disadvantages of each strategy, including detailed explanations and demonstrations during the sessions; review of clinical information during the sessions and after consultations; illustrations; support for the family during the therapeutic process; telephone contact and intensive modules with reduced short-term goals. It is best to use them in combination for the authors. The aim of the present study was to investigate the issues around health literacy and the recall of health information from clients who have undergone speech-language therapy in public health units in Cape Town and also how can these issues be overcome, focusing on clients with dysphagia, voice disorders (including laryngectomy) and cleft lip and/or palate. The authors conducted an exploratory study with a focus on speech-language therapist and their clients who had received treatment during the six months prior to data collection. They were recruited from two hospitals of the public health system of Cape Town in South Africa. Data were collected through four focus groups discussions and qualitatively analysed. It was identified five themes and 13 subthemes from the

FuzEmotion as a backward kansei engineering tool

Kansei engineering, also known as kansei ergonomics or emotional engineering, aims at analysing and incorporating customer's feeling and demands into product function and product design. Founded in the late 1970's, kansei is now considered as a key consumer-oriented technology for new product development. This paper described a system called FuzEmotion for the purpose of assessing the kansei aspects of a product by considering design attributes of a product. Fuzzy logic is used to represent kansei words and process fuzzy input. The system has been successfully implemented to ascertain gender inclination of a mobile phone. Principal parameters of a mobile phone are considered, i.e., length, width, thickness, and mass. The system can inform gender inclination of a mobile phone with accuracy up to 76%. This is based on a set of 92 mobile phone samples from the five major mobile phone manufacturers.

Effect of Harmonic Features for Designing Product Sound Quality

In the design of emotional qualities, which are evaluated by the customer's subjective impressions, feelings and emotions, such as a feeling towards product sound, a designer needs to find the design factors that affect the emotional quality and determine the characteristics of their effects. The authors previously proposed a method for extraction of potential emotional factors by analyzing human sensitivity towards unexplored design and applied the method for designing product sound quality. From the result using vacuum cleaners as a case study, the authors found that the existence of prominent peak tones in sound around 500Hz has the potential to improve sound quality. However, prominent peak tones are usually regarded as a factor of annoyance. In this paper, we propose an indicator for adjusting the frequency and level of peak tones to improve a product sound quality. We have assumed that the harmonic features of peak tones in noise can be used as the indicator. We created vacuum cleaner sounds having three peak tones whose harmonic features such as tonal consonance and modality are different. To evaluate the effectiveness of the harmonic features, we conducted a pairwise comparison-based sensory evaluation with two groups of participants, one consisting of those who play some musical instrument and the other of those who do not. From the experiment, we found that the peak tone harmonic features can be perceived by both groups of participants and significantly decrease their annoyance at vacuum cleaner sounds.

Design Rule Extraction from a Trained Ann Model using Ga for Product form Design of Mobile Phones

Abstract An artificial neural network (ANN) model and rule extraction from a trained ANN using genetic algorithm (GA) are applied to predict and advise on the rules for optimal product form design for a particular customer feeling. To map design elements and the affected impressions, principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to determine the essential dimensions for data analysis. By using ANN to examine the relationships between perceptual value and form elements, black-box ANN knowledge can be extracted by applying GA to generate design rules. A case study on the product form of a mobile phone design was conducted to implement the proposed approach. The resultant rules can be used to help product designers to better understand key design elements and to verify optimal solutions suggested by using ANN models.

The inclusion of ergonomic tools in the informational, conceptual and preliminary p hases of the product design methodology

The process of product development has received special attention as it is being recognized as a source of competitive gain. Through its systematic use companies reduce costs, increase quality and decrease development time. However, one can find products being launched on the market that cause dissatisfaction to its users, and in consequence if the customer feels harmed or injured he will no longer purchase a product from the same brand. This in regard only to the commercial aspect; usually the danger of an accident or injury is not even thought about. This paper is the basis of the dissertation master's degree and used a literature research to build the repertoire, analyzing the methodologies applied by product design engineers, designers and ergonomists. The analysis results demonstrate the inefficiency of the design methodologies ergonomic issues. The contribution of this work lies in the suggestion to include ergonomic tools in all phases of product development and the presentation of a table with the tools that points out its most suitable time of application and results.

Advertising Decisions In Small BusinessesNeed For New Directions

Irrespective of the size of a firm or the size of the budget, advertising is an important function that is expected to have an impact on the sales volume. In addition, small business needs and strategies are quite different from those of larger businesses. In addition to the size of operations and budget, small businesses differ from larger firms on major target market characteristics that include the boundaries of the trading area and customer feelings and shopping behavior towards small businesses. Consequently, the necessity or relevance of different media options for advertising are expected to be significantly different. Suffice it to say that advertising decisions are important enough for small businesses and serve careful investigation and yet it has been ignored in the past.The main purpose of this study is to examine the methods used for setting advertising budgets in small businesses. A secondary purpose is to ascertain the attitudes of the decision makers on the importance of advertising budget.

English

The paper aims to improve the security of the credit card online purchasing with taking into account the time and cost issues. Since the current online purchasing system using credit card has security drawbacks, a security improvement is suggested in this work by implementing a model which integrates the current authentication system of credit card with the fingerprint authentication. Moreover, it complements with a technique for validating and transmitting the fingerprint features. The customer submits his or her credit card information through the internet together with a file containing the fingerprint features and a validation code. This technique makes the customer feels more secure, at the same time it makes credit card fraud more difficult. Credit card information, fingerprint transaction authorization code and fingerprint features were the main components of the model. The authorization code is able to handle the usage of the scanned fingerprint features for one time only and preventing the submission of old and expired features. In addition, a ‘biometric and authorization code’ file is presented in this work to increase the fingerprint features security. It has its own structure in terms of storing the authorization code and fingerprint features which is unknown for the attacker and known only for the matching program. The average processing time consumed by the model to match all the data is 2.47 s while the overall accuracy rate was 99.48% with 0.52% error rate.   Key words: Credit card, authentication, fingerprint and biometrics.

Most Preferred Business Banking Product of HDFC Bank in Trichy City

Change is the only constant factor in this dynamic world and banking is not an exception. The changes staring in the face of bankers relates to the fundamental way of banking-which is undergoing rapid transformation in the world of today, in response to the forces of completion productivity and efficiency of operations, reduced operating margins better asset/liability management, risk management, any time and any where banking. The major challenge faced by banks today is to protect the falling margins due to the impact of competition. Another significant impact of banks today is the technology issue. In this study the business banking products of HDFC bank, that best suits the needs of the borrower were analysed. The Customer feels that loans to be obtained require a process that is extremely complicating and time consuming. This calls for an ombudsman setup separately for the domain. The observation and findings of the study have helped to give useful recommendation to bank. The implementation of the suggestion can help to improve strategies and build competencies over that of their competitors. This study has there by helped me by giving exposure into new concepts in today’s banking scenario as the interface shifts from service to products. There has also been some insight into competency recognition.

ED Nurses as Business Developers: Creating a Community, Part 2

ED Nurses as Business Developers: Creating a Community, Part 2

White response to potentially discriminatory actions in a services setting

Discrimination in the marketplace is a significant problem for many blacks and for service providers. However, recent research suggests that some whites may respond similarly to blacks when they witness what they perceive to be a discriminatory act in a service encounter. Using an experimental design methodology, this research investigates the extent to which this occurs. The degree to which an observing customer values the other customer's welfare and feels empathy has been found to explain differences in service failure perceptions among white study participants. White participants high in empathy for blacks were found to react similarly to blacks relative to the inherent negativity of the service failure. This suggests that a service failure involving black customers that hints of discrimination has a greater overall impact on the long-term success of the service firm than originally envisioned. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

An evaluation of SERVQUAL and patient loyalty in an emerging country context

The growth of the service sector in the US spawned a strong interest and growing body of literature related to the measurement of service quality. SERVQUAL, a multi-item scale first proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1985), has been used for measuring customer perceptions of service quality across a wide variety of service environments including healthcare in the US. There is a dearth of research that relates to an evaluation of SERVQUAL across various cultural and economic environments. This empirical study is an attempt to fill this gap by focusing on the healthcare environment in Istanbul, Turkey. In addition to a rigorous evaluation of SERVQUAL using confirmatory factor analysis, measures of internal consistency and discriminant validity, the relationships between the various dimensions of SERVQUAL, an overall measure of service quality and patient loyalty are evaluated using structural equations modelling and path analysis. A number of hypotheses are developed and tested. The results suggest that SERVQUAL and its dimensions of perceived service quality are reliable and valid across cultural and economic environments in the context of healthcare/hospital albeit some need for adaptation. Path analysis indicates that service quality directly affects both overall quality of and feelings toward hospital services. Overall quality affects customer repatronage intentions and feelings towards hospital services. However, no significant relationship was found between service quality and repatronage intention.

A review on Data Mining Applications to the Performance of Stock Marketing

Data mining is the extraction of hidden predictive information from large data bases. Data mining is used to increase revenues and reduce costs. Data mining finds patterns and correlations or relationships in data by using sophisticated techniques. In today‟s society of high demanding customers, increasing competitiveness and in order to avoid the initial investment of gathering a data without being certain that it will be successful. A customer-focused approach will discover customer‟s preferences, needs and behavioral characteristics. The current approach is described for data development in share market to find the correlations between the customer feelings or perceptions and the physical characteristics of a data. Stock Market is an organized set-up with a regulatory body and the members who trade in shares are registered with the stock market and regulatory body SEBI. The stock market is also called the secondary market as it involves trading between two investors and itis often considered the primary indicator of a country's economic strength and development. The NSE is the largest stock exchange in India in terms of daily turnover and number of trades, for both equities and derivative trading.

Customer experience and value: A performance view

Companies often say they are customer focused, which presumably means that their operational processes and cultural practices are aligned to maximize the value delivered to customers, but how do you assure that? Two factors that contribute to customer perceptions of the quality of product or service are functional quality, how well a product or service meets customer needs, and behavioral quality, how the customer feels about using or owning the product or service. There are also functional and behavioral factors that contribute to customers' perceptions of costs. Considering these factors we have developed a performance model to aid in the pursuit of greater customer value.

Perspectives and the new trend of Kansei/affective engineering

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present and discuss Kansei engineering (KE), which uses a unique ergonomic technology to produce a new product which fits to consumers' feelings and demands. It is a consumer‐oriented product development method based on the consumer mind. It has been applied to realize several new Kansei products so far.Design/methodology/approachKE is sometimes able to create an invention, but mostly it is powerful to create more comfortable and affective products or services to the customers. KE utilizes psychological methods to grasp the customer's feelings, and the data obtained by this method are analyzed using multivariate statistical analyses which are transferred to the design domain (design specifications).FindingsIt was found that a customer has a hierarchy of values of his/her life. All people, from children to the elderly, want to enhance their quality of life. Having qualified products and services, including service men's smiles and greetings is an important factor.Originality/valueKE is spreading out in the world at present. The paper (witten by the pioneer and founder of KE) tells “a story” about the methods and procedures to create a new Kansei product and refers to the implications of Kansei/affective engineering.

Customers' Identification of Acceptable Waiting Times in a Multi-Stage Restaurant System

The problem of waiting is critical in service encounters.No customer feels satisfied when s/he has to wait too long. Therefore, identification of acceptable waiting times is a good starting step in effective wait time management in a restaurant. Thus, this study was designed to provide restaurant managers with insights on acceptable waiting times for customers. Results showed that the acceptable waiting times vary depending on the service process stages and respondents' expectation levels (satisfactory, unsatisfactory, and very unsatisfactory). Participants placed different levels of importance on each stage of wait, and gender and age categories influenced their responses.