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The importance of software has been growing rapidly owing to the development of various Internet and e‐business applications. One of the active research areas in software involves its evaluation methods or models. The traditional approaches to software evaluation are based on the development process point of view, and their major concerns are not strongly related to user or customer‐oriented evaluation of software. In this paper, a maturity model and a corresponding evaluation system are suggested that focuses on software customer satisfaction. As a case study, they are applied to 18 software companies and their 180 customers in Korea to prove their practical values.

The purpose of this study was to investigate relationships among the experiential value of hotel apps, the cognitive and affective evaluation of hotel apps users, hotel apps users’ satisfaction and their endorsement for the hotel apps. Specifically, this study examined the relationships that enhance hotel guests’ experiences through hotel apps.

The measurement items were developed through extensive literature review. This study used a web-based survey to test an integrated model of the experiential value. With a total of 320 usable samples, partial least squares structural equation modeling was carried out to identify key “driver” constructs and validate the proposed model.

A significant relationship was found in the playfulness of hotel apps and hotel guests’ cognitive and affective evaluations of the hotel apps, which positively influence hotel guests’ satisfaction and their endorsement for the hotel apps. Hotel apps should create fun and entertainment features in the hotel apps so that the users of hotel apps can be enjoyable during their usage. In addition, providing hotel apps users with time saving and easy use of the hotel apps can affect their satisfaction and endorsement for the hotel apps.

This study confirmed the positive links among hotel apps users’ experiential value, their cognitive and affective evaluation of the hotel apps, their satisfaction of using the hotel apps and their endorsement for the hotel apps. This study also revealed that hotel apps can be hotels’ effective communication tool that enhances existing and potential customers’ overall experiences.

项关于体验价值的综合模型

摘要

本论文旨在研究关于酒店APP体验价值, 对酒店APP用户的认知和情感评估, 用户满意度以及用户支持之间的关系。具体而言, 本研究探索了如何通过酒店手机APP使用来提高用户体验的理论关系。

测量条目通过详尽的文献综述来产生。本研究运用了网络调研来测量体验价值的一项综合模型。由320项有效样本, 偏最小二乘法结构方程建模（PLS-SEM）来鉴定关键“驱动”构象以及验证提出的模型。

研究发现酒店APP的娱乐性对顾客的APP的认知和情感评估都起到了显著性作用, 进而对顾客满意度和酒店APP支持度产生正面影响。研究建议酒店APP创造有趣以及娱乐产品功能, 从而让酒店APP用户从使用中获得乐趣。此外, 为酒店APP用户提供省时方便的服务可以影响用户满意度和对酒店APP的支持。

本研究验证了酒店APP用户体验价值, 对酒店APP的认知和情感评估, 用户对使用酒店APP的满意程度, 以及对酒店APP支持的正相关性。本研究进而发现酒店APP可以作为提升酒店现有和未来用户全面体验的有效工具.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of customer service employees’ (CSEs) competence and service recovery outcomes on service evaluations of foreign and domestic CSEs.

Three experiments were conducted to test and validate the proposed hypotheses. The participants were told a cover story that they were either listening to (Study 2) or reading (Studies 1 and 3) a real conversation between a customer service representative of a bank and a customer and the authors wanted their views about the service encounter. While country of origin (COO) and competency were common independent variables across three studies, Study 2 included service recovery with a full refund and Study 3 had both full and partial refund and apology offered or not.

Results from three experiments show that while competent CSEs are evaluated the same, regardless of their COO, the domestic CSE is evaluated more negatively than the foreign CSE when both are incompetent. The authors also find that when competent CSEs deliver no service recovery, the foreign CSE evaluations are significantly lower than the domestic one. Study 3 results show that this effect is mediated by participants’ ethnocentric beliefs.

For implications, this study provides a deeper understanding of the role of COO in services contexts. Future researchers can utilize the findings to investigate the important role that expectations play in determining service excellence and how it affects the COO effect.

The paper provides managers in both offshoring client and provider firms with an understanding of the effects of offshoring on employee evaluations. It discusses the relevance/irrelevance of COO on the customer evaluations of service employees.

The study investigates an under researched phenomenon – offshoring of services. This paper is one of the few looking at the role of different interaction factors, such as competence, recovery on service evaluations.

Drawing on the branded service encounters perspective, the purpose of this study is to investigate how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ brand evaluations.

The research conducted two experiments. The first experiment explored the effect of frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations via corporate hypocrisy. The second experiment explored the moderation effect of employees’ prototypicality and the importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) among customers.

Experiment 1 indicates that for firms with a green brand image, frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors result in customers’ perception that the firm is hypocritical, thus reducing their brand evaluations. Experiment 2 shows that employee prototypicality and CSR importance to the customer enhance the negative impact of frontline employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors on customers’ brand evaluations through customers’ perception of corporate hypocrisy.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employees.

This study suggests that firms’ green brand image does not always lead to positive customer response. When frontline employees’ behaviors are inconsistent with firms’ green brand image, it can trigger customers’ perceptions of corporate hypocrisy and thus influence their brand evaluations. Therefore, firms should train frontline service employees to make their behaviors align with the firms’ green brand image.

This study is one of the first efforts to explore how frontline service employees’ environmentally irresponsible behaviors affect customers’ responses. It helps understand the impact of frontline employees’ counter-productive sustainable behaviors on customers’ brand perception, as well as the relationship between CSR and employee.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test an integrated conceptual framework using construal level theory (CLT) to explain the differences in the effects of process and outcome service attributes on overall service evaluation and customer satisfaction based on consumption context (social), evaluation context (temporal) and individual characteristics (expertise).

The authors use two lab experiments (hotel and restaurant settings) and a field study of online reviews posted by actual hotel customers to test all the hypotheses.

Process (outcome) attributes have a stronger influence on service evaluations under low-level (high-level) construal. Specifically, process attributes have a stronger influence when customers are accompanied by proximal (vs distal) social group, evaluate a service under near (vs distant) temporal frame or have high (vs low) level of customer expertise.

Service managers can use the findings about the differences in the influence of social, temporal and individual variables on customer evaluations under process and outcome attributes to improve customers’ service experiences and satisfaction.

This paper extends past research on the influence of construal levels on customer decision making by exploring the differences in the effects of process vs outcome service attributes on overall service evaluation and customer satisfaction, under the influence of low (vs high) construal levels triggered by social, temporal and individual variables.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the strategies of formal customer evaluations and the use of satisfied customer index in the Swedish commercial real estate industry.

This research is based on an inventory of 24 commercial real estate companies use of formal customer evaluations and an analysis of 15 interviews with top-level managers in the Swedish commercial real estate sector.

Only half of the companies included in the study conduct formal evaluations, although they are considered to work customer oriented. Two different strategies for using formal evaluations is, for improvement work and for signalling quality. One proposed explanation to why only half of the companies conduct formal evaluations is the possibility that the official Swedish Real Estate Barometer is not sufficient if the company would like to use the result for organisational development. There are instead indications that this barometer mainly is used in publicity and marketing purpose, to signal quality.

The research in this paper is limited to Swedish commercial real estate sector. But, the overall strategies for conducting formal evaluations should be applicable in general.

The insight the paper provides regarding how the industry perceive the Swedish Real Estate Barometer gives direct implications of improvements of the barometer.

It provides an insight regarding the use of formal customer evaluations and a proposition of how the Swedish Real Estate Barometer could be changed to better support and fulfil the aim of being a barometer for benchmarking.

To examine precisely how service process and service outcome are related to service quality and customer satisfaction evaluations, and to look for consistent patterns in the relationships between these four concepts.

A theoretical framework is proposed to suggest links between the four concepts. The study is conducted in the real estate industry, and the focus is on home sellers' evaluations of the real estate agent's service. In‐depth interviews and a short survey are used to collect the data. A combination of content analysis and statistical tests is used to look for patterns in the data.

As proposed, process factors are closely linked with service quality, and outcome factors are closely linked with customer satisfaction. Also, as proposed, service quality evaluations precede customer satisfaction for normal service evaluations, but the opposite causal order is found for extreme service evaluations.

The study is conducted in the USA and is based on a relatively small sample, but sufficient for qualitative (and simple statistical) analysis. The differential links proposed and found between the four concepts advance researchers' understanding of the basis for service evaluations.

Managers can focus more on either service process or service outcome based on their specific objectives and/or resource constraints in different situations.

It is the first study to propose and empirically support the idea that service process is closely linked with service quality evaluations, whereas service outcome is closely linked with customer satisfaction evaluations.

This study aims to examine how brands attempt to extend their customer set not through the typical route of adding brands, but through the strategic extension or enlargement of their target customer set. Building on theories from both reference group perceptions and brand identification, this research explores the impact of strategic customer extensions on current target market consumers.

Two scenario-based experiments explore strategic customer extensions for a packaged goods brand and a well-known retail brand. The analysis involves both analysis of variance and SEM methods.

Current target market consumers’ evaluations of strategic customer extensions are informed by reference group perceptions relating to the proposed customer extension. When current target market consumers perceive strategic customer extensions as potentially attracting a dissociative reference group, consumers have weaker evaluations and brand identification measures and, subsequently, weaker future intentions towards the brand.

The brand identification literature is augmented by incorporating theories from the reference group literature to demonstrate how to reference group perceptions drive a current target market consumers’ evaluations of strategic customer extensions to affect the strength of the identification that current target market consumers have with a brand. Brand identification is also demonstrated as mediator customer evaluations and subsequent intentions towards the brand.

The paper aims to address the issue of how customer value is created in the context of novel food products and how customer value influences product evaluation.

The study proposes a model formed by a series of causal relations among value (i.e. functional, social, hedonic, altruistic values) and cost perceptions (i.e. price, effort, evaluation costs, performance and product safety), their trade-offs (i.e. overall customer value) and product evaluation outcomes (i.e. satisfaction, trust).

Despite doubts about certain search (information), credence (safety) and experience (taste) attributes, perceptions about product quality, likeability and ethical image predominantly formulate customer value, indicating novel products’ potential to be evaluated positively by consumers.

The proposed model advances knowledge in the context of product innovation. Contrary to past research that focuses on consumer attitudes towards a manufacturing technology and individual technology-specific risks and benefits, the customer value approach refers to novel product-related consumer attitudes conceptualized as overall customer value; the latter results from product-related value-cost trade-offs, leading towards specific consumer–product evaluations.

The customer value approach refers to the value from the adoption of a new product that underlies a relevant set of product attributes (e.g. quality, image, sustainability, price, convenience, taste, safety, etc.) Focusing on product attributes that generate gain – loss perceptions impactful on consumer – product evaluations is highly relevant for product managers concerned with new product development.

The originality of this work lies in the successful contextualization and testing of an inclusive model that comprises both emotional and rational components, operational at the product level, to generate substantial insights on the widely unexplored interplay between consumer – perceived customer value and the generation of consumer – product evaluation outcomes.

Building upon humans’ trichromatic vision systems, dual-process theory and halo effects, this paper aims to examine the effects of red and green color brightness of food pictures on customers’ evaluations and purchase intention of restaurant food.

The proposed hypotheses were tested across three experimental designed studies on a total of 575 participants. Multilevel analysis, analysis of variance and multivariate analysis of variance were applied for data analysis.

This paper provides empirical evidence of the effects of red brightness and green brightness on customers’ affective and cognitive evaluation of food and purchase intention in Study 1. Study 2 validates the effects of red and green brightness on food evaluation with the presence of nutrition information. Study 3 further elaborates on the halo effects of color brightness on customers’ favorable intentions to patronize a restaurant and willingness to pay for a meal in a controlled lab experiment.

One main limitation is that this paper focuses on unveiling the role of color brightness and does not consider other picture properties, which opens an avenue for future research.

This paper includes implications for food promotion and management of customers’ experience via food pictures.

This paper is one of the first attempts to reveal the effects of red and green brightness of food pictures on customers’ food evaluation and food consumption behavioral intentions.