Disconnect to Connect to Different Age Group Customers

The present study aimed to identify the inabilities of service firms to connect to different age group customers whilst the era of smart technologies. Despite various service innovations customer services seem to be worsening across the world. It is imperative to understand different age group customers' experiences while using smart technologies to address current customer strategies and practices in the service sector. The study adopted the CIT method to collect participants’ experiences who were using smart technologies in various service settings. The study indicates that how staff and top management personnel of service firms are using smart technologies as a shield to avoid human contact with their customers presently. Additionally, the study highlights the relevance of people, empathy, and interactive marketing practices for improving services even in the era of smart technologies. It means that service firms should connect more and more customers through various smart technologies but get themselves disconnected from these technologies to keep a direct human interaction.

A Research on the Satisfaction of Islamic Banking Customer Services in Riau Province During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This research is motivated by curiosity about Islamic banking services in Riau Province during the Covid-19 pandemic. But before that, it is also important to examine customer knowledge on products and service facilities in Islamic banking, reasons customers choose Islamic banks, and reasons customers use both types of banks (Islamic banking and conventional banking). This research is a field research with survey technique. The population is Islamic banks customers in Pekanbaru and the samples in this study refer to the calculation of Hair et al with total assets of Islamic banks in 2020 as a consideration in determining proportional allocation. Sources of data in this research are primary and secondary data. While the data collection techniques using questionnaires and documentation. The data analysis technique uses descriptive statistics with a frequency distribution. The results of the research found that there are still many Islamic bank customers who do not know about specific Islamic bank products such musyarakah products, mudharabah products, ijarah products,and rahn services. The results also found that religious reasons are the main factor for customers in choosing of Islamic banks. The factor of ease of access to more branches is the main reason customers use both types of banks. Finally, the results of the research found that the most Islamic bank customers are satisfied with various aspects of the services provided by Islamic banks, while the five service aspects whith the highest level of customer satisfaction are Islamic bank staff friendliness, Islamic bank name and image, Islamic bank employee skills, confidentially Islamic bank customer data, as well as various kinds of facilities offered by Islamic banks. The results of this research are ini line with studies that have been conducted in Jordan and Kuwait, where the highest level of satisfaction is found in the name and image aspects of Islamic banks even though there are differences in respondent demographics and the condition of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A VR-Enabled Chatbot Supporting Design and Manufacturing of Large and Complex Power Transformers

Virtual reality (VR) immersive technology allows users to experience enhanced reality using human–computer interfaces (HCI). Many systems have implemented VR with improved HCI to provide strategic market advantages for industry and engineering applications. An intelligent chatbot is a conversational system capable of natural language communication allowing users to ask questions and receive answers online to enhance customer services. This research develops and implements a system framework for a VR-enabled large industrial power transformer mass-customization chatbot. The research collected 1272 frequently asked questions (FAQs) from a power transformer manufacturers’ knowledge base that is used for question matching and answer retrieval. More than 1.2 million Wikipedia engineering pages were used to train a word-embedding model for natural language understanding of question intent. The complex engineering questions and answers are integrated with an immersive VR computer human interface. The system enables users to ask questions and receive explicit and detailed answers combined with 3D immersive images of industrial sized power transformer assemblies. The user interfaces can be projected into the VR headwear or computer screen and manipulated with a controller. The unique immersive VR consultation chatbot system is to support real-time design consultation for the design and manufacturing of complex power transformers.

Consequences of Growth at Freedom AV Life Insurance

The case deals with ethical issues in marketing in a larger context encountered while managing channels. Freedom AV Life Insurance, established in 2002, was a laggard in terms of revenue generation among private life insurers in the country. A new CEO, Ramesh Ramachandran, was hired to improve revenues, which drastically improved post his joining and upon on him hiring a new sales head. However, customer grievances multiplied, and Rajesh Bhardwaj, the customer services head, was questioned by the CEO and was asked to submit an action plan to stem the rising complaints. Bhardwaj felt this was the result of mis-selling by agents and the salesforce of the company. Bhardwaj proposed a solution by emailing the sales head. Just as he had finished writing the mail, he was surprised to find a new mail from the CEO asking him to prepare a presentation before the company’s board of directors in two days. At the end of the case, Bhardwaj becomes engulfed with self-doubt and anxiety on what to present before the board members. The case deals with ethical issues in marketing financial products like life insurance and looks at solutions to the practice of mis-selling financial services. Students would attempt to find answers to the question of whether they can achieve sales goals without resorting to unethical practices.

Mutual impact of acoustic and linguistic representations for continuous emotion recognition in call-center conversations

<div> <div> <div> <p>The goal of our research is to automaticaly retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down to improve customer services. To compensate the lack of large annotated emotional databases, we explore the use of pre-trained speech representations as a form of transfer learning towards AlloSat corpus. Moreover, several studies have pointed out that emotion can be detected not only in speech but also in facial trait, in biological response or in textual information. In the context of telephone conversations, we can break down the audio information into acoustic and linguistic by using the speech signal and its transcription. Our experiments confirms the large gain in performance obtained with the use of pre-trained features. Surprisingly, we found that the linguistic content is clearly the major contributor for the prediction of satisfaction and best generalizes to unseen data. Our experiments conclude to the definitive advantage of using CamemBERT representations, however the benefit of the fusion of acoustic and linguistic modalities is not as obvious. With models learnt on individual annotations, we found that fusion approaches are more robust to the subjectivity of the annotation task. This study also tackles the problem of performances variability and intends to estimate this variability from different views: weights initialization, confidence intervals and annotation subjectivity. A deep analysis on the linguistic content investigates interpretable factors able to explain the high contribution of the linguistic modality for this task. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Mutual impact of acoustic and linguistic representations for continuous emotion recognition in call-center conversations

<div> <div> <div> <p>The goal of our research is to automaticaly retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down to improve customer services. To compensate the lack of large annotated emotional databases, we explore the use of pre-trained speech representations as a form of transfer learning towards AlloSat corpus. Moreover, several studies have pointed out that emotion can be detected not only in speech but also in facial trait, in biological response or in textual information. In the context of telephone conversations, we can break down the audio information into acoustic and linguistic by using the speech signal and its transcription. Our experiments confirms the large gain in performance obtained with the use of pre-trained features. Surprisingly, we found that the linguistic content is clearly the major contributor for the prediction of satisfaction and best generalizes to unseen data. Our experiments conclude to the definitive advantage of using CamemBERT representations, however the benefit of the fusion of acoustic and linguistic modalities is not as obvious. With models learnt on individual annotations, we found that fusion approaches are more robust to the subjectivity of the annotation task. This study also tackles the problem of performances variability and intends to estimate this variability from different views: weights initialization, confidence intervals and annotation subjectivity. A deep analysis on the linguistic content investigates interpretable factors able to explain the high contribution of the linguistic modality for this task. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Towards an increased understanding of learning: a case study of a collaborative relationship between a retailer and a logistics service provider

PurposeThis study aims to explain how learning occurs in collaborative retailer–logistics service provider (LSP) relationships. The research is guided by two research questions, addressing absorptive and desorptive capacities and the interaction between these capacities.Design/methodology/approachThe study is based on a case study of a Swedish, collaborative retailer–LSP dyad. The empirical data are structured around five specific learning situations within the retailer–LSP dyad.FindingsThe findings provide an explanation for how learning occurs within a collaborative retailer–LSP relationship based on subprocesses of absorptive and desorptive capacities. The interaction between these processes is found to rely on two types of support: one-directional and bidirectional. The findings also indicate positive outcomes of learning, such as improved cost efficiencies in warehouse operations, better customer services and improved long-term strategic planning.Practical implicationsThis study shows how retailers and LSPs can learn from each other and together create an improved logistics system for end customers.Originality/valueThis research takes into account absorptive and desorptive capacities in a collaborative retailer–LSP relationship. This study enhances the understanding of inter-organisational learning processes in a retail logistics context.

FDI - A GREAT OPPORTUNITY FOR INDIAN ECONOMY

Foreign Direct Investment provides maximum benefits to developing countries, it helps to boost the economy development , generate employment opportunities , also help to provide professional skills , better customer services and also increases government revenue , FDI results in maximum benefit for the targeted country then the foreign invest , even during this pandemic situation , India is the only country that has achieved maximum benefit from FDI , China , Japan and Saudi Arabia also have achieved benefits from FDI in 2020. FDI investment in 2020 was mostly from Singapore and United States , there are many countries which invest in India , it is the largest beneficiary in South Asia , and third ranks in the international market , Maximum countries want to invest in India , India is growing very fast with FDI . However there are a few advantages also of FDI in India , it is disadvantage for the small industries to cope with high MNCs and also there are times when it might result in exchange crisis and many other . FDI in India will be amplified in the upcoming years. Keywords: FDI, developing countries, employment, India, beneficiary, investment, international market

Promoting Customer Loyalty and Satisfaction in Financial Institutions through Technology Integration: The Roles of Service Quality, Awareness, and Perceptions

This study examines the effects of quality of service, product awareness, and perceptions among customers of Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) on customer loyalty through technology integration using customer satisfaction as a mediator. A well-structured, comprehensive questionnaire was developed and data were collected from 203 respondents who were customers of six IFIs in Pakistan and had at least 2 years of experience in dealing confiorm this is correct with these IFIs. A total of 171 accurate responses were received from the respondents. Ten hypotheses were developed and statistically verified using regression and correlation analytical techniques. The results reveal that the quality of customer services and awareness of IFIs had a direct and positive relationship with customer loyalty, which in turn was mediated by customer satisfaction. Perceptions about IFIs had a direct positive relation with customer satisfaction. However, the relation of perceptions and quality of service with customer loyalty and satisfaction in financial institutions through technology integration was found to be insignificant, even in the presence of customer satisfaction as a mediator.

Perceptions of self-service technology in the small, rural public library of New Zealand: Self-issue @ Selwyn Library – a case study

<p>Self-service technologies are prevalent in our society, and libraries are no exception. The general consensus emerging from the literature outlines the main benefits of self-service implementation: namely resource saving and enhanced customer services. However a more negative view emphasises potential challenges such as cost, staff and customer resistance, as well technical difficulties, not to mention the “dehumanizing of the library”. Much of this current research has tended to focus on the experiences of larger urban libraries with correspondingly large budgets and economies of scale. To address an apparent gap in the literature, this paper aimed to find out how well self-service is accepted in the small, rural public library of New Zealand by conducting a case study on one technology at one library: self-issue at Selwyn Library. A threefold approach was taken: first the statistics were analysed to give a picture of what was happening in terms of self-issue usage; second, staff were interviewed to get their insights and viewpoints; third, customers, both users and non-users of self-issue, were surveyed for their perspectives. The study concluded that self-issue did have a place within the small rural New Zealand public library context. Though some barriers existed there was a section of library customers who embraced it and staff were positive about the potential benefits self-issue could effect. The context also meant that there was a degree of flexibility that may be unavailable to larger institutions. The dual characteristics of not having expensive security systems to integrate with coupled with close customer relationships, allowed smaller libraries to try their own self-issue systems without exorbitant expenditure. The study’s main limitation is that it is based on the experiences and data from one library which has only had self-issue for just over a year, and the particular situation that exists there may not be applicable to other libraries.</p>