• International Journal of Quality Innovation
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.46-70
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• 2007

Customer Support Knowledge of Customer Support Organization is one of the important assets of enterprises and "Customer Support Knowledge Management" is also the critical aspect of Business Knowledge Management; however, the attributes of Customer Support Knowledge are complicated, diverse, renewed rapidly and difficult to be managed. Thus, in order to design a successful Customer Support Knowledge Management System, apart from the consideration of "human" and "information technology" aspects, the concerns of attributes and Customer Support Knowledge and industry characteristics should be involved for meeting the requirements of Customer Support Organization and allowing the organization to acquire the competitive advantage of "Differentiation Service". This research used the "Customer Support Knowledge Management System" in a high-tech industry as an example and treated the end users of medical instruments in different types of hospitals in Taiwan which have received the support service of our company in recent six months as the population. The end users were mostly the nursing executives or ultrasonic wave technical personnel in intensive care unit and they had similar educational background and incomes and adopted the medical instruments such as physical supervision system, ultrasonic wave system, heart start or ECG machine produced by our company; the research method was to randomly treat the investigation results of the telephone customers' satisfaction from respective 30 end users in the population three months before and after this system execution as the samples and use hypotheses to validate if the end users' customer satisfaction significantly improved in terms of "Remote Support," "On-site Support," "Service Turn Around time," "Technical Competence" and "Manner" in order to understand the influence and managerial significance of execution of "Customer Support Knowledge Management System" on Customer Support Organization.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.83-103
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• 2018

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of customer-contact employees support on service recovery efforts. Service companies should try to prevent the service failure situation from occurring, but it is realistic that the service failure occurs due to the characteristics of the service. Service recovery efforts of service providers are important because effective responses to service failures can enhance customer satisfaction despite service failures. Social support for customer-contact employees needs to improve service recovery efforts. Specifically, this study focuses on the mediation roles of job burnout and customer orientation in relationship between social support for customer-contact employees and service recovery efforts. Social exchange theory was used as the theoretical underpinning of the research model. Based on reciprocity principle, this paper suppose that support for customer-contact employees and service recovery effort are a kind of social exchange relationship. Social supports for customer-contact employees are categorized into internal and external organization. Internal organization is POS(perceived organizational support) and external organization is customer support. The research model was tested with the data gathered from the flight attendants whose emotional labor intensity was relatively high and the service failure frequently occurred. As a result of analysis, social supports for customer-contact employees classified into organizational support, supervisor support, and customer support are found to have differential impacts on job burnout and customer orientation. It has been found that job burnout of service providers is negatively affecting service recovery efforts. On the other hand, customer orientation of service providers has a positive influence on service recovery efforts. Based on the results of the analysis, we provide practical implications for effective service recovery efforts in service failure situations, and suggest the theoretical implications to explain the process of service recovery effort. Finally, limitations of the study and directions for future research are suggested.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.12
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• pp.969-976
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• 2020

The role of customers has changed from that of passive users to value co-creators. Therefore, it is important to understand how customer learning takes place and how it affects customer experiences with services and products. However, while past studies insist on the importance of the issues in designing customer experiences, they do not empirically address these issues. This study investigates the support processes for customer learning, and their impact on customer learning, which in turn influences customer experience. To test the hypotheses, we employed the survey method. Target informants were the actual users of Apple iPods. A total of 200 survey questionnaires were distributed and 146 were collected. Among these, seven erroneous responses were excluded, leaving 139 usable ones. The proposed model was empirically analyzed using the Covariance-based SEM (Structural Equation Modelling) technique. The findings of this study suggest that, among the three support processes in customer learning, learning-by-doing support and learning-by-investment support positively affect customer learning, which influences customer experience. This study contributes to the literature by identifying different types of support for different kinds of customer learning processes and by empirically testing the impact of the support for the process on customer learning, and in turn, its impact on customer experience.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.194-206
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• 2024

The study aimed to analyze jay-customer behavior's impact on service industry employees' job stress to understand the importance of personnel management. Additionally, it aimed to identify strategies for managing job stress by examining perceived organizational support's moderating effects. The results show that the subdimensions of jay-customer behavior (i.e., verbal aggression, physical aggression, and sexual harassment) positively influenced employees' job stress. Second, job stress acts as a mediator between customer verbal and physical aggression and customer orientation, but not between customer sexual harassment and customer orientation. Third, organizational support had a moderating effect on the association between customer verbal aggression and job stress. This study demonstrates how jay-customer behavior negatively affects employees and threatens their well-being. It not only enriches the research on jay-customer behavior but also provides implications for service companies toward developing internal marketing strategies for enhancing employee happiness and fostering customer orientation.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.1-26
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• 2013

To improve the competitiveness of the hospital provides high quality medical services in a hospital coordinator role is emphasized. This study on customer orientation of the role ambiguity in order to identify the impact of degree of customer orientation were analyzed for demographic differences. Dependent variable, customer orientation affects role ambiguity as independent variables, and regression analysis were set. And the control variables are set to support situational factors, customer orientation on the role ambiguity and hierarchical regression analysis was performed. Obtained through empirical results are as follows: First, according to the demographic characteristics of the hospital coordinator customer orientation, the difference between gender and medical subjects are not shown. Age, education, work experience, job title, and the hospital on the pattern of customer orientation has shown a difference. Second, according to the hospital coordinator role ambiguity about its impact on customer orientation analysis can be a role implementation, job implementation, opinion communication in achieving customer orientation was negatively affected. Third, role ambiguity, and customer orientation factors for the moderating effects of organizational support for the role of customer orientation can role implementation, job implementation, opinion communication was a statistically significant. Fourth, the role ambiguity factors and customer orientation for the administrative support for the moderating effect of customer orientation and role implementation is significant, but job implementation, opinion communication were statistically significant. Fifth, the role ambiguity factors and customer support for customer orientation and customer orientation for the moderating effects of role performance and the opinion communication was not statistically significant. However, job implementation was statistically significant. The limitations of this study are as follows: First, role ambiguity, situational factors and support due to limitations of the variable factors that may affect the customer orientation of a number of factors were excluded. So many exogenous variables in the measurement process can affect. Second, the variables measured as problems of self-assessment by the variable measuring the respondent's bias may occur. Third, This study is difficult to generalize. In other words, several areas of the province conducted by the empirical results of the survey as a limit on the overall generalization can follow.

• Korean Journal of Human Ecology
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.269-284
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• 2012

The main purpose of this study was to investigate factors affecting performance of casual wear franchise stores including franchiser support and social network between owners/managers. The study included the franchise stores of 55 casual wear brands located in Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi-do. In each store, one manager, owner or staff member with management responsibility was asked to fill out a questionnaire. A total of 184 questionnaires were collected with 165 used in the final analysis. The results showed that franchiser support consisted of educational support, marketing support and customer support. Path analysis indicated that only the educational support had a significant influence on the franchiser-franchise relationship, and in turn, the franchiser-franchise relationship positively influenced customer performance. Marketing support did not have a significant influence on the franchiser-franchise relationship, but did demonstrate a direct influence on customer performance. Social networks positively influenced customer performance, and there was significant a correlation between regions and social networks on customer performance. Sales performance was significantly influenced by customer performance.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.486-496
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• 2018

Customer incivility is an important stress factor employees performing service tasks, and this is equally true for employees who perform civil affairs services. The purpose of this study is to investigate the negative effects of adverse customer behavior and ways to reduce it. This study adopts the Conservation of Resource (COR) theory in order to examine customer incivility. This study predicts that customer incivility will negative emotions and eventually lead to emotional exhaustion in employees. We also predict that social support (organizational support, supervisor support, coworker support) perceived by employees would moderate the relationship between customer incivility and negative emotions. This study is based on 481 questionnaires collected from public officials. The results are as follows: First, customer incivility causes negative emotions. Second, negative emotions mediate the relationship between customer incivility and emotional exhaustion. Third, the relationship between customer incivility and negative emotions showed moderating effects on the perception of organizational support which is one of three types of social support. Based on the results of this study, implications, limitations, and future direction of research are suggested.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.121-133
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• 2003

Due to the rapid growth of Internet, means of communication with customers in a traditional customer support environment such as telephone calls are being replaced by mainly e-mail in a Web-based customer support system. Although such a Web-based support is efficient and promises potential benefits for firms, including reduced transaction costs, reduced time, and high quality of support, there are some difficulties associated with responding to many types of customer's inbound e-mails appropriately. As many types of e-mail are received, considerable attention is being paid to methods for increasing the efficiency of managing and responding e-mails. This research proposes an intelligent system for managing customer's inbound e-mails in organizations by applying case based reasoning technique for responding to various customers' inbound e-mails more effectively. In this approach, a case is represented as a frame-typed data structure corresponding to an inbound e-mail, keywords, and its reply e-mail. In the retrieval procedure, keywords and affinity set is developed to index a case, and then the case is represented as a vector, a case vector. Also, cosines value is calculated to measure the similarity between a new inbound e-mail and the cases in the case base. In the adaptation procedure, we provide several adaptation strategies to adapt and modify the retrieved case. The strategies guide to make an outbound e-mail using product databases, databases for customer support, etc. Additionally, the Web-based system architecture is proposed to implement our methodology. The proposed methodology and system will be helpful for developing more efficient Web-based customer support.

• The Journal of Industrial Distribution & Business
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.27-38
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• 2018

Purpose - This study centers on field surveys aimed at deriving the customer satisfaction factors of customer support centers that are positioned between suppliers and consumers in the supply chain. They consists of manufacturing, sales, distribution, consumption and collection, and that are in charge of core functions for suppliers' customer satisfaction management and consumers' satisfaction with consuming activities. Research design, data, and methodology - The customer satisfaction factors of customer support centers were derived through literature review and expert opinion surveys, and a questionnaire was developed through a process of the refinement of variables using pilot tests and 330 questionnaire sheets were distributed. The questionnaire sheets were collected and opinions in them were analyzed using fuzzy AHP methodology. Results - Three factors, which are turnover intentions, motivation, and job satisfaction, were derived as customer satisfaction factors of customer support centers, and the ranking relationships of these three factors were analyzed. In addition, the ranking relationships among six execution variables of turnover intentions, 10 execution variables of motivation, and 10 execution variables of job satisfaction were analyzed using fuzzy AHP methodology to obtain quite significant results. Based on the results of this study, three implications in the three strategic aspects and an implication in the academic aspects are presented. Conclusions - Motivation and job satisfaction, job satisfaction and turnover intentions, and motivation and turnover intentions are not formed by independent or different factors or environments. They are in the same context with each other (maintaining high correlations) and are in the relationships of virtuous circles in which they complement each other.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Food Culture
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.231-239
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• 2014

We studied customer recognition and understanding of menu labeling as well as the correlations between customer support for menu labeling and multiple factors, such as demographic characteristics, dinning-out behavior, and menu selection criteria. This study designed a survey and received responses from 351 individuals. The analysis results reveal that most respondents did not acknowledge menu labeling or lacked knowledge of it. Many of the respondents showed experience in ordering from menus with ingredient labels, but many showed no interest in menu labeling. Exactly 114 (32.5%) respondents showed support of menu labeling, and most were interested in levels of trans-fat, fat, and cholesterol. The respondents reported that menu labeling should be implemented more in fast-food restaurants and causal dinning restaurants. This study also analyzed how customer menu selection criteria are related to support level of menu labeling. Respondents were classified into three groups based on their support level for menu labeling (low medium high), after which correlations between customer menu selection criteria and support level were examined. Respondents in the high support group considered all menu selection criteria (i.e., ingredients, health, and consideration of calories). GLM analysis showed that monthly dining-out expenses were highly related to support level with a significance level of 0.05, and the interaction between monthly dining-out expenses and respondents' jobs also affected support level with a significance level of 0.01.