Search results

This paper aims to determine the importance of the human touch in customer service interactions.

The paper is based on two original studies using tech‐savvy respondents, utilizing a survey and scenario‐based research.

The paper finds that, even for tech‐savvy customers, human touch is an important factor in both customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions.

The study is limited to US respondents and telephone‐based service encounters.

This paper shows the importance of keeping some aspects of the human touch in customer encounters with the firm. Firms cannot rely on self‐service technology for all services.

This paper fulfills a gap in the existing services literature, with a specific focus on valuing human interaction in technology‐enabled service encounters.

The volume of international patients has been growing in the past 15 years, with developing countries gaining a larger market share. The international patients market is lucrative, given that hospitals may be able to attract an affluent clientele, and many patients from foreign countries who seek care require complicated procedures and treatments. The purpose of this paper is to build on previous work in the international business and health services fields, to develop a model that predicts a hospital's ability to attract international patients.

The paper is a synthesis of the literature on export ventures and patient choice to predict a hospital's “export” performance.

It is estimated that around 70,000 foreign patients travel each year to the USA to receive inpatient medical care. These patients not only benefit hospitals and medical professionals but also benefit the local community through money spent in hotels, restaurants, shopping, etc. Strategic management, international business, and health services research fields can help us understand how hospitals can be more competitive in attracting international patients. The authors propose that the following dimensions affect a hospital's export performance: hospital resources (hospital attributes, international competence, management commitment, and strategy); institutional environment; and domestic hospital industry factors.

More empirical work is required to test the authors' model.

Most of the studies done on international patients were descriptive in nature. This is the first paper that builds a conceptual model to help us understand what determines a hospital's performance in the international patients market.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight, exploratory research, and support for the strategic use of hospital secondary support functions as an initial strategy for marketing healthcare, increasing patient volume, and expanding patient satisfaction.

This research paper is based upon longitudinal patient satisfaction and perception studies following both emergency room and elective‐stay hospitalization visits in Beirut. Exploratory statistical methods are used to examine substantial data comprising over 300 patient stays. Comprehensive information is presented which illustrates patient perceptions, their inflection points, and the importance of this knowledge in the marketing of hospitals and health care systems.

This research paper presents that patient perceptions are significantly influenced by hospital support functions. Further, these perceptions determine hospital reputation, influence future patient demands, and are integral to the understanding of patients as consumers of health care systems rather than consumers of medical procedures.

This paper provides support for health care system administrators who are often at odds with health care core service administrators and personnel with respect to long‐term hospital growth strategies. It illustrates that focusing on increasing core competencies is a short‐sighted approach to developing health care systems. It provides support for growing secondary support functions as being a more efficient means to increasing long‐term core competencies.

The originality of this paper is that it illustrates the conflict between the immediate medical care that health care systems understand to be their strategy and the strategies that truly grow hospital health care systems. It illustrates the paradox that requires hospitals to focus upon secondary support functions rather than core competencies in order to market themselves using strategies consistent with long‐term growth.

The objective of this paper is to develop a better understanding of brand engagement by examining two of its antecedents: design benefits and consumer emotions. The authors explore the relationship between design and brand engagement and advance a model with emotional responses as mediator.

This paper integrates a range of theoretical works across design and marketing, including concepts of product design, types of design benefits, brand engagement, and brand communities.

The authors propose a conceptual model where emotional arousal, which differs across design benefits, mediates the relationship between design benefits and brand engagement. Brand engagement intensifies with emotional arousal as design benefits change from functional, to hedonic, to symbolic.

The conceptual model proposed in this paper can have significant applications in the areas of product design, branding strategies, and brand communications. However, it has not been tested empirically.

The resulting model improves understanding of how marketers can use design to elicit different forms of brand engagement. Implications for marketers include planning brand engagement outcomes early in the product or service development process; involving consumers in that process, clearly communicating the benefits of the design; and supporting venues where brand engagement of different types can be practiced.

Brand engagement is unique brand-related behavior that has received limited attention in the design and marketing literatures. The proposed model offers a look at brand engagement from a design perspective, while emphasizing the role of consumers' emotional responses to design benefits.

By studying the leadership role of management and faculty in a Pakistani University to find out gaps in the delivery of technology integrated services in enrolment and advisory capacity offered at the beginning of every new term at the University of Central Punjab in Lahore, Pakistan, this paper seeks to find the impact of the process of service delivery on customer loyalty and positive word of mouth, the key objectives for attaining quality.

A mixed methods approach, comprising survey and interviews were used to investigate customer satisfaction. Factorial analysis and SEM modeling was applied to quantitative data, whereas coding and interpretive analysis were used for qualitative data.

The results highlight the differences in leadership style adopted by management and faculty. The SEM model suggests that, as long as students lack autonomy and perceive a lack of empowerment of faculty, their satisfaction with the enrolment and advisory services will be affected negatively and will result in negative outcomes on word of mouth.

The small sample and contextual nature of study limit the scope of generalization. However, the analysis contributes toward improving the leadership approach of Pakistani management and faculty at private universities.

The study identifies the challenges faced by the management in providing customer satisfaction with the services by approaching the problem from a different angle, i.e. leaders' use of their cognitive resources and their relationship focusing on customer satisfaction. It extends the research literature on leadership styles as being applicable to student services available.