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Customer Expectations (customer + expectation)
Selected AbstractsWhat happens when things go wrong?PSYCHOLOGY & MARKETING, Issue 7 2004Retail sales explanations, their effects Not all marketplace interactions are initially successful, and often customer expectations are not met, resulting in dissatisfaction, which leads to complaint and redress-seeking behavior. In this process, the nature of the explanations and other aspects of the firm,customer interaction are critical. This study investigates the proposition that explanation adequacy plays a critical role in the resolution of unsatisfactory sales encounters. Data were collected from a sample of consumers and analyzed with the use of structural-equation modeling. The findings indicate that explanation adequacy is influenced by the style and content of the explanation and the timeliness of an organization's reaction. However, explanation adequacy appears to only influence the final perceptions (indirectly) of the severity of the incident and emotional reaction to it, and the perceptions of the extent of the justice of the resolution and the assignment of blame to external factors were found to be intervening variables. The results also indicated that the assignment of blame to internal factors was unrelated to the adequacy of an explanation, but did influence emotional reactions and the perceived severity of the incident. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] DoE in engine developmentQUALITY AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING INTERNATIONAL, Issue 6 2008Karsten Röpke Abstract Stricter legal emission limits and increasing customer expectations lead to a growing number of controllable engine components and thus to a higher engine control complexity. For engine development, however, this means much greater time and effort is required to find the optimal combination of all selectable parameters. This trend can be observed in the field of Gasoline as well as for Diesel engines. At the same time, the development time from the first idea up to the introduction of a new production engine has become even shorter, and the costs have to be reduced. Since the number of measuring points required for complete operational-test measurements rises exponentially with the number of input variables, it is quite obvious that full factorial measurements are no longer possible. Therefore the method ,Design of Experiments' (DoE) is widely accepted as a suitable tool in the automotive sector and among its suppliers. In the meantime the term ,DoE'/,DoE-Process' covers often also the measurement procedure and the modeling. Likewise, this method is broadly applied in the IAV (author's note: IAV is a German provider of engineering services to the automotive industry) during the advanced development stage up to the production engine applications. Whereas DoE is used mainly in the area of steady-state applications recent research work shows a great potential also to optimize transient engine behavior. This paper will give an overview about the usage of statistical methods (mainly Design of Experiments) in the production engine calibration. ,Engine calibration' is the term for finding the optimal settings of the engine controller unit; optimal in terms of minimal emissions, minimal fuel consumption, good drivability and other brand specific goals. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] End-to-end availability considerations for services over IMSBELL LABS TECHNICAL JOURNAL, Issue 3 2006Abhaya Asthana Lucent IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture provides an open framework for multimedia applications that support blended text, voice, and video services. Providing objectives for service downtime and failure rates, which reflect the end customer perspective, can be used to drive corrective and preventive action that better satisfy end customer expectations. However, the frameworks and techniques to do this on an end-to-end basis for network solutions of the complexity and size of IMS are not well established. In this paper we address the questions of specifying, estimating, and verifying the end-to-end availability for services over IMS. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for establishing availability requirements and service failure rate metrics, and for performing "end-to-end" service downtime analysis. The framework can be used to guide network design and evaluate end-to-end performance in the field. © 2006 Lucent Technologies Inc. [source] Engineering an Anti-Graffiti System: A Study in Industrial Product DesignCHEMICAL ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY (CET), Issue 8 2004A.J. Hutchinson Abstract The objective of this work was to develop products for the anti-graffiti market using a product design framework that takes into account the company core practices and meets customer expectations. Product development comprised several concurrent steps including market research and analysis to determine the market potential using a Quality Functional Deployment tool. From market research it was estimated that anti-graffiti products had significant potential within Australia. A range of technical and quality parameters were tested. The Hildebrand and Hansen solubility parameters, viscosity and diffusivity estimates were mainly used for technical evaluation of products. An iterative process was used throughout in conjunction with parameter restraints to meet environmental sustainability, waste reduction and minimize resource consumption. The result was a cost effective product, tailored to customer expectations. [source] Modeling and Managing the Percentage of Satisfied Customers in Hidden and Revealed Waiting Line SystemsPRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2006Chester Chambers We perform an analysis of various queueing systems with an emphasis on estimating a single performance metric. This metric is defined to be the percentage of customers whose actual waiting time was less than their individual waiting time threshold. We label this metric the Percentage of Satisfied Customers (PSC.) This threshold is a reflection of the customers' expectation of a reasonable waiting time in the system given its current state. Cases in which no system state information is available to the customer are referred to as "hidden queues." For such systems, the waiting time threshold is independent of the length of the waiting line, and it is randomly drawn from a distribution of threshold values for the customer population. The literature generally assumes that such thresholds are exponentially distributed. For these cases, we derive closed form expressions for our performance metric for a variety of possible service time distributions. We also relax this assumption for cases where service times are exponential and derive closed form results for a large class of threshold distributions. We analyze such queues for both single and multi-server systems. We refer to cases in which customers may observe the length of the line as "revealed" queues." We perform a parallel analysis for both single and multi-server revealed queues. The chief distinction is that for these cases, customers may develop threshold values that are dependent upon the number of customers in the system upon their arrival. The new perspective this paper brings to the modeling of the performance of waiting line systems allows us to rethink and suggest ways to enhance the effectiveness of various managerial options for improving the service quality and customer satisfaction of waiting line systems. We conclude with many useful insights on ways to improve customer satisfaction in waiting line situations that follow directly from our analysis. [source] Assessment of hidden and future customer needs in Finnish business-to-business companiesR & D MANAGEMENT, Issue 4 2001Hannu Kärkkäinen The development of new products should be based on the needs expected to exist even several years ahead , at the moment of market introduction and during the whole lifecycle of the product. To develop successful new products in the toughening business environment, companies should be able to surpass customers' expectations and to assess emerging customer needs proactively. Early, thorough understanding of the customer's real needs, including the assessment of hidden and future customer needs and requirements, plays a very important role in the successful development of new products. The purpose of our paper is to study the assessment of new (hidden and future) customer needs for product development in Finnish business-to-business companies. We have carried out a survey in 93 Finnish business-to-business companies and SBUs to study their common problems in the assessment of unrecognized customer needs and potentially effective ways in clarifying new customer needs and dealing with important problems. On the basis of the results, we propose several possible ways to facilitate the assessment of unrecognized customer needs. [source] | |||||||||||||