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To build long-term relationships and gain a competitive edge, marketers need to provide customers with unique and distinct experiences that they cannot find in other companies. According to the literature, after-sales service helps to achieve these goals. By modeling the linkages between after-sales service, service quality, customer attitude and purchase intention, this study aims to understand how customers perceive after-sales service in decision-making in kitchen appliance industry.

Through purposive sampling, 324 respondents, primarily female, answered a structured questionnaire about their perception of after-sales service for kitchen appliance products. Previously well-established, validated scale measures from the extant literature were used. The responses were gathered using a seven-point Likert scale.

According to the findings, after-sales service quality is vital in kitchen appliance buying decisions. Accordingly, the higher the quality of service perceived by the customer, the more favorable the brand's attitude and purchase intention will be. Additionally, brand reputation was found to be an essential moderator between customer attitude and purchase intention, suggesting that the reputation of the kitchen appliance brand plays a positive and significant role in consumers’ purchase intentions.

It is well known that after-sales service plays a crucial role in current business scenarios, but empirical research on kitchen appliances has been scarce. This study aims to fill a void in the existing literature by investigating the relationships between after-sales service, after-sales service quality, customer attitude and purchase intention in the domain of kitchen appliances.

This study aims to examine the concept of brand equity and willingness to buy second-hand products in the automobile context. The customer-based brand equity model is used as a theoretical lens to examine after-sales services, brand credibility and brand loyalty as drivers of brand equity and willingness to buy the second-hand product.

A survey questionnaire based on convenience sampling is used to collect the data from the car owners. A total of 433 survey responses were used to empirically test the measures and propositions by using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The findings suggest that after-sales services are a key factor in developing brand credibility and brand loyalty. Results are also in support of the positive and significant impact of brand credibility and brand loyalty on brand equity and willingness to buy second-hand products.

Brand equity represents a differential response and preference to marketing efforts that a product obtains as a result of its brand identification. Although practitioners are actively engaged to position themselves as a unique, attractive and strong brand, little is known about the equity of the brand in the case of second-hand products. This study provides an alternate branding view to the academic scholars and to the marketing manager as this study explicitly probes into the effect of after-sales services in developing brand credibility, brand loyalty, brand equity and wiliness to buy second-hand product as an outcome.

The purpose of the study is to discover clusters or homogenous groups of work-from-home (WFH) Internet subscribers in the Philippines based on the attributes of speed, network quality, customer service, after-sales support, price, contract and value for money. Another objective is to determine if the formed clusters are related to the demographic profile.

A total of 275 internet subscribers from Metro Manila were surveyed. K-means cluster analysis using the Hartigan-Wong algorithm was performed on the data to generate the clusters.

Results generated four significant clusters, which were named service value expecters, average expecters, low expecters and high expecters. Most of the subscribers are under the high expecters, followed by the service value expecters. The age and income of the subscribers are the profile that can affect the formulation of clusters in the Internet service industry. Those people in the younger age groups can be seen as more demanding, while older people tend to be content with the Internet service. Counter-intuitively, people with higher income seem to be more easily satisfied with Internet service features, while those people with lower income seem to be more demanding. Educational attainment and the number of household members do not have a direct effect on the formulation of clusters of Internet subscribers.

This is the first study to use cluster analysis in identifying possible segments of WFH Internet subscribers based on Internet service attributes. Its value is the provision of market segments based on which can be the basis for formulating marketing strategies and policies for the telecommunications industry.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the relevance of the factors that influence the satisfaction of e-commerce consumers in Romania and Moldova. The study aims to clearly define the main influence factors, so that the marketing managers of the online stores can adopt scientific well-founded decisions.

The paper opted for a study including a large sample of 399 respondents from two countries. For the analysis of the factors influencing the e-commerce satisfaction, multiple linear regression analysis was implemented, and their differentiation within the two countries was highlighted by multivariate analysis of variance.

The research conducted and the results obtained show that there is a differentiation of the factors that influence the level of satisfaction of e-commerce users in Romania and Moldova.

The research is still limited in terms of population studied to only two countries: Romania and Moldova. Although the study is intended to be exhaustive by analyzing no less than 11 factors influencing the satisfaction generated by e-commerce, it is still limited to this group of representative factors. Another limitation has to do with the limited number of demographic variables the authors have included.

Based on the results, the managerial implications for e-commerce companies that want to uniquely address consumers in Romania and Moldova are related to the decisions of marketing and sales managers who must allocate budgets and resources to improve the eight aspects highlighted in the paper. Also, the e-commerce companies should not allocate resources for the implementation of functionalities such as in-app after sales services, the possibility to cancel an order or the live consultant support feature, because these aspects do not influence the satisfaction of e-commerce consumers in Romania and Moldova.

This paper is the first in the scientific literature that implements a comparative study on the influence factors regarding the e-commerce satisfaction in Romania and Moldova. Also, it is important to mention that the present study is an exhaustive one because it includes many influence factors that were analyzed separately in the previous research papers from literature review.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the servitization phenomenon of product-centric companies, by identifying the resources, capabilities and organizational aspects needed to successfully deploy a servitized business model (BM).

By adopting a literature-based approach, this paper develops a servitization maturity model (SeMM) aimed at assessing and positioning companies in the servitization journey. The paper also illustrates the model application to two small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), a machinery and a forklift truck company.

The SeMM identifies a set of 85 critical requirements that are used to evaluate the servitization level of product-centric companies, through a specific five-stage measurement scale. The requirements are categorized into: five maturity dimensions (organizational approach, process management, performance management, tools, capabilities) and nine BM Canvas components. The empirical application exemplifies how the SeMM can support managers in identifying and bridging the gaps in their servitization journey.

The SeMM adopts an original bi-dimensional approach and provides an operationalization of the servitization process through the identification of specific critical requirements framed on established BM and maturity dimensions taken from the literature. Moreover, the model responds to a call for research to develop practitioner-oriented tools and guidelines to support the servitization process, in particular for SMEs, and to the need to go beyond to measures of servitization based on indicators about number of services offered or their turnover.

New service businesses carry opportunities for industrial companies. The different cost management and management control implications of those service businesses deserve attention, which is a widely under-researched area in management accounting and control literature. Digital twins could hold potential in unveiling and supporting those new service business opportunities, as a unique approach of this paper. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility and potential for creating a digital twin of a service, especially to unveil the management accounting and control implications of the digital twin in developing new service businesses.

This paper investigates the potential of a digital twin in unveiling cost and control implications of new service businesses by examining the characteristics of a digital twin in the service business development context. The paper use an in-depth interventionist case study, where the designed animations illustrate the possibilities of a digital twin of a service. The animations showing the service process characteristics were first used as a communication tool and eventually those animations were actively used in customer cases for different purposes. This motivated the idea for examining the implications of such animations representing a digital twin of a service.

The paper provides empirical insights regarding the potential for developing and using a digital twin of a service for different cost management and management control purposes. The digital twin of a service may include all main details of a new service offering, simulating the functionality of a service, hence making the performance and the implications of the new service concept clear for all the stakeholders. The digital twin of the service enables defining the processes, setting targets and helps communication about the value generation. Thus, they represent a significant toolkit for the management accounting and control function of the manufacturers.

This paper is among the first attempts to understand the digital twin of the service. The paper is unique in providing financial and control implications of digital twins also in the context of service business development. The in-depth interventionist approach enabled an exceptional exploration process on the subject. The article paves the way toward further research on managing the digital twins of services in the future.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the fit between the strategy of service centres and their business model (BM) and to identify the BM components' characteristics and links that allow it to stand out in terms of service delivery and business performance.

This study applies an inductive qualitative multiple case study approach through the empirical analysis of top-performing Italian service centres operating in the Medium–Heavy Commercial Vehicle sector.

Research findings underline that the BM components of top performers are consistent amongst each other and with the adopted strategy and make a positive impact on the firm's performance. In particular, top performers are characterised by a solid financial structure based on equity, formalised and flexible organisational structures and processes, clarity in strategic direction and long-term orientation, grounded capabilities, competences and skills, trustful relationships with main service partners and a comprehensive set of managerial mechanisms.

This paper presents some limitations, typical of qualitative research based on case studies. Future works may include other dimensions of performance for identifying top performers, and extend the empirical analysis to different sectors and national contexts.

This paper supports the relevance of contingency theory – particularly the strategy-structure-performance paradigm – in the analysis of the role of a BM in successful servitization strategies of service centres. It highlights that the BMs of the top-performing companies are characterised by some common elements. From a practical perspective, the authors provide insights that can be useful for designing successful service-based BMs for service networks.

Many organizations expect their service engineers, or frontline employees (FLEs), to behave as brand advocates by engaging in favorable communication about the brand and its offerings toward customers. However, this approach is not without risk as customers may be disappointed or even frustrated with brand advocacy behavior in many service encounters. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of FLEs’ brand advocacy on customer satisfaction with the service encounter, and identify the conditions under which the effects are detrimental. This paper specifically considers service issue severity and product newness as contingency conditions.

Building on social identification theory, the paper builds a conceptual model, which is empirically tested using a data set that matches data from service engineers, customers, and archival records from the after-sales service department of a globally operating business-to-business print and document management solutions provider.

This paper finds that brand advocacy behavior harms customer satisfaction especially in service encounters that involve simple service issues (e.g. maintenance) for products that are new to the market. Fortunately, brand identification can compensate this negative effect under many service conditions. While the joint effect of brand identification and advocacy is most beneficial for severe service issues of new products, no effect on customer satisfaction was found for established products.

This paper identifies those service situations in which brand advocacy is advisable and guides managers toward achieving more favorable customer evaluations.

Past research has considered several FLE branding activities in the frontline but the effects of brand advocacy have not been isolated. In addition, most studies have assumed the effects of employee brand-related behaviors on customer satisfaction to be universally positive rather than negative and focused on antecedents and not on moderators and consequences.

A way that companies have found to respond to the challenges of customer satisfaction (CS) is the development logistics services quality. In this sense, the purpose of this paper is to estimate the quality of logistical service as a mediator factor in the relationship between logistics capabilities (LC) and CS. For this, an exploratory survey of the descriptive type was carried out with 117 companies in the Brazilian market of lubricant oil. The collected data, modeled in structural equations, have shown evidence that the quality of logistics services totally mediates the relation between the LC and the satisfaction of clients.

In order to respond to the research problem and to meet the stated objective, a study was carried out in two phases. The first used an exploratory qualitative design, and involved recorded in-depth interviews with five clients and five managers of a lubricant oil producer located in the municipality of Umuarama and nearby areas in Paraná state, Brazil. The second used an exploratory survey of the descriptive type was carried out with 117 companies in the Brazilian market of lubricant oil.

The collected data, modeled in structural equations, have shown evidence that the quality of logistics services totally mediates the relation between the LC and the satisfaction of clients.

It is suggested that new studies be conducted in order to increase the size of the sample, since the number of responses obtained (117 respondents), for the number of initial variables (34 measures).

In the pursuit of CS, the managers of lubricant oil producers should make major investments in LC, to enable the company to be active in the search for logistics solutions, integration and provision of reliable information to its customers.

The studies should also be carried out in other market segments, in order to compare the results obtained in the lubricating oil segment of Brazil and corroborate knowledge about the influence of logistical capabilities on the relation between logistics service quality and CS.

The logistics services quality perceived by the customers is derived from the service capacity of the producer’s employees and the quality of information provided to the customers.