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The purpose of this paper is to analyse how the espousing of customer relations has evolved over time in the real estate sector. Has a shift occured within the Swedish real estate sector from product thinking towards customer thinking?

The research is based on an analysis of 25 commercial real estate companies' annual reports from the last five years. The annual reports are analysed through text analysis using the theoretical framework of Mintzberg's five Ps.

The Swedish real estate sector has in general made the shift from product orientation to customer orientation. There was, however, no significant change during the last five years and most of the companies espoused customer orientation already in 2004. The study implies that it is not sufficient to categorise the companies between product or customer oriented. Instead four categories are suggested: product, customer, project, and financial orientated. Customer orientation, as measured here, was higher in listed companies and in larger companies.

The research in this paper is limited to the Swedish real estate sector.

The paper shows the espoused values regarding customer relations of the commercial real estate companies that can be found in their annual reports. As the annual reports are a marketing instrument it should reflect the senior management's core values. By highlighting how the top management's core values regarding customer relations are espoused an understanding for the sector is built up.

The aims of a project to introduce customer relations standards to a District Health Authority are discussed. The manner in which staff guidelines are produced and staff action programmes are developed is examined and ways in which the corporate identity of the Health Authority may be changed by improvements in customer services are explored.

This monograph argues that boardroom marketing must be integrated with purchasing and distribution activities in a synthesised role focused on customer policy. The author sees this as the next step forward and argues that such a new alignment in company thinking would enable it to take account of the host of societal pressures it encounters, as well as improving management approaches toward channel members. Issues of independence/interdependence, professionalism, educational imperatives, and materialism are all examined and a customer policy audit proposed with suitable guidelines. It is a radical and provocative think‐piece worthy of widespread attention amongst senior marketeers, purchasing and distribution executives.

Because of competition, residential property developers use a variety of promotional tools to gain recognition and increase their market share and the demand for housing, and to manage their customer relations. This study aims to examine what real estate developers did to detect the need for types of housing, and pricing and promoting housing. It also sought clues about how they manage customer relations in residential sales.

In this study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with real estate developers. This study has heuristic characteristics based on qualitative data. Document reviews, descriptive analysis and discourse analysis were carried out on the interview data and other sources. As purposeful sampling is generally used in qualitative studies; intensity sampling, homogeneous sampling, criterion sampling and snowball sampling were used together in this study.

The study found that real estate developers were inadequate at advertising and promoting, allocated little budget for promotion and did not use technology sufficiently. The real estate developers gave discounts at rates that did not actually desire, had to create payment plans, and as a result, they lost customers because they could not manage customer relations well.

Interviews were conducted with 15 real estate developers who have been selling residential properties for more than 10 years in Süleymanpasa and Çorlu districts of Tekirdag. Data obtained are mostly qualitative.

This study aimed to determine real estate developers’ ability to implement a variety of promotional strategies and manage customer relations. Results and conclusions can offer significant clues about real estate developers with similar characteristics. Its conclusions of this study can be compared to similar studies of real estate developers in many regions of Turkey.

This paper aims to advance the literature by extending the empirical relation between a firm’s strategy and socially responsible value drivers (customer/employee relations) beyond firm performance to the impact on earnings persistence. Although existing research demonstrates that management’s effective implementation of a specific strategic orientation such as cost focus or product differentiation leads to better financial performance, no studies, to the authors’ knowledge, directly address the effect of strategic orientation on the persistence of earnings.

This paper utilized the evaluation of a firm’s focus on employee and customer relations through the rating provided by Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini. It uses linear regression analysis to identify statistically significant relations.

The findings demonstrate that simply focusing on socially responsible employee and customer relations alone does not result in higher earnings persistence. But rather, higher earnings persistence is associated with firms whose strategic orientation is aligned with the firm’s socially responsible value drivers. Additionally, we find that the capital market understands the importance of alignment between a firm’s strategy and its value drivers.

The analysis was based on a large-scale sample, and the authors concede that as a consequence of this decision, the results are based on indirect assessments of the firm’s actions rather than direct feedback from the firm. However, the authors believe the large-scale, external assessment that they use increases the generalizability of the results.

The results provide guidance to management and boards of directors regarding the critical nature of disclosure regarding firm strategy and corporate social responsibility (CSR) as well as inform financial statement users as to useful relations beyond the actual reported accounting numbers.

Existing research has explored the relation between CSR and improved financial performance, but no studies, to our knowledge, examine the relation a firm’s strategy and value drivers (customer/employee relations) has on earnings persistence. Earnings persistence is worthy of study, as it captures the non-transitory nature of earnings, which is a useful attribute for both internal and external users of financial reporting.

Based on the system of value chain theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social media usage on the performance and the entrepreneurial orientation of the organizations.

A total of 174 organizations responded to the survey.

The result of the study showed that social media usage has a very strong positive impact on organizations’ performance, in terms of cost reduction, improved customer relations, and enhanced information accessibility.

In the study, social media usage was categorized into three sub-constructs such as social media usage for marketing, social media usage for building customer relations, and social media usage for information search. This study investigated the usage of social media and its impact as a whole, considering all social media tools together. Finally, this study used a cross-sectional sample to collect data.

The result of the study benefits the managers to understand the various areas of organizational performance that can be improved by social media usage.

The study also provided evidence that social media usage has strong positive influences on enhancing the entrepreneurial orientation of the organizations.

This study provides a clearer idea on the real importance of social media and its benefits. This study demonstrated the various areas of organizational performance that can be improved through social media usage.

The process of choosing a bank has been studied for several decades through different approaches. This paper presents a bank choice analysis designed to assess the usefulness of the hierarchical information integration method which involves measuring individual preferences. The substantive conclusions of this study are that, on average, respondents prefer the extended loyalty programs, the continuous information flow from the bank, the off‐site ATMs, the maximum five‐minutes waiting time in the branches and a simple application for all the accounts the bank offers. In terms of higher‐order decision constructs, delivery channels and customer relations have the strongest influence on the respondents’ preferences. The results suggest that hierarchical information integration may be a potentially useful method for bank managers to study complex decision‐making problems such as bank choice.

The paper presents the development of a continuous improvement process for the customer relations department at Severn Trent Water in the UK. In‐company research was carried out to identify the main barriers to continuous improvement in the areas of leadership, training, communication, motivation, teamwork, and change management. The study concluded that the company should develop an organisational culture and management style to support continuous improvement of daily working processes, and that change should be managed against the achievement of appropriate quality targets. A continuous improvement process was developed based on a structured problem‐solving model incorporating the application of established quality tools, to be applied by problem solving teams from the customer relations department. It was recommended that the team members should be trained in the problem solving process, and the related quality tools and techniques. Also, management should lead and support this approach by concentrating on team (rather than individual) performance achievement.

Today, in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), entrepreneurs must take a more strategic perspective that is evidenced by the need to scan the enterprise to discover how they might improve customer relations as well as promote improved entrepreneurial actions. The paper aims to focus on this issue.

This study examines the impact of the existence of an “open‐minded context” in an organisation at time (T) on actions that concern the challenging of entrepreneurial actions at time (T+1). It also examines the relationship between explorative and exploitation processes and customer relations. These relationships are examined through an empirical investigation of data obtained from 107 SMEs from the Spanish telecommunications industry, using partial least squares (PLS).

The results indicate that the effects of an “open‐minded context” at time (T) on customer relations at time (T+1) are mediated through the existence of explorative and exploitation knowledge processes at time (T+1).

Practices which may be based on explicit knowledge or on tacit knowledge in the form of processes and routines need to be challenged prior to the adoption of new knowledge by the organisation. In such situations, it will be necessary to modify or even delete some knowledge in order to ensure that employees have access to the up‐to‐date explorative and exploitative knowledge processes necessary to maintain or enhance customer relations.

In situations where organisations and their members face rapidly changing environments it is necessary to challenge the entrepreneurial actions which have been derived from the founding entrepreneurs.

The paper examines how the nature and existence of an open‐mindedness context is linked to the nature and existence of knowledge exploration and exploitation processes enacted by the workforce of an organisation.

Customer forgiveness is gaining importance in service recovery. This study debates that service firm employees and the customers’ relations are supportive resources for the customer while deciding for forgiveness. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to test the effects of structural, relational and cognitive social capital on customer forgiveness and thereof the effects of customer forgiveness on negative word of mouth and repatronage intentions.

Partial least squares–structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypothesized relations on usable data from 428 banking customers who registered their complaint recently.

Results show that structural, relational and cognitive social capital explained a unique variance in customer forgiveness with significant positive influence, whereas customer forgiveness has a significant positive effect on repatronage intentions and a significant negative influence on negative word of mouth.

Customer forgiveness is a convincing idea in service recovery. This study proposed and empirically verified that social capital in relations of service firm employee and customer relations is important for customer forgiveness to minimize negative word of mouth and enhance repatronage intentions.