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Fostering Engaged Prospects Through Digital and Social Media: How to Get and Keep Their Attention
Abstract
In the age of innovation, social media is the ideal platform for academic bodies to reach out to prospective students, currently enrolled students and alumni. This chapter explains role and significance of social media in keeping students engaged. Student as customer concept is in trend which keeps academic institutions under pressure to improve quality. Prospective students expect academic institutions to be transparent in their governance and promote simple and easy to use social media and digital channels for information. The inevitable role of social media for connecting alumni and current student worldwide for networking is explained in this chapter. Social media is an affordable tool for academic institutions to connect to larger student network, but it is important to learn how to use the social media to influence and engage students and alumni of both online and on campus program. The objective of this chapter is to use various examples to help readers understand the concept well to attract prospective students and retain current students.
This study was intended to research the strengths and weaknesses of the UN peacemaking missions in Africa from1945 to 2018. The research utilized a qualitative meta-synthesis method (Sandelowski & Barroso, 2006). The study employed a descriptive technique for synthesizing findings from previous literature (Sekaran & Bougie, 2003; Paterson, Thorne, Canam & Jillings, 2001). The investigation was of causal type because it seeks to understand the reasons why some African people would behave differently by rejecting the UN (Wright, 2018). The selection and analysis of the existing literature took place in a contrived setting. Eight African countries that have received a UN peacekeeping mission in the past represented the unit of analysis in this study. The time horizon was of a cross-sectional type, where data was gathered over a period of weeks. The data collection process for this qualitative meta-synthesis study followed the guidelines of Sandelowski and Barroso's (2003, 2006). The research used a randomized selection procedure to choose from a set of literature (Erwin, Brotherson & Summers (2011). The data was collected from inter-related qualitative literature completed on the UN peacekeeping mission in Africa. While most people would not tolerate mistakes involving peacekeeping matters, the findings in this study have demonstrated that the UN has not underperformed regarding its commitment to provide international peace. The findings also revealed that people who have expressed hatred against the UN by attacking its staff and facilities are those who have experienced unsuccessful UN peacekeeping missions.
The rise and spread of the Internet has led to the emergence of a new form of word of mouth (WOM): electronic word of mouth (eWOM), considered one of the most influential informal media among consumers, businesses, and the population at large. Drawing on these ideas, this paper reviews the relevant literature, analyzing the impact of traditional WOM and eWOM in the field of consumer behavior and highlighting the main differences between the two types of recommendations, with a view to contributing to a better understanding of the potential of both.
Taking into consideration the importance of information and communications technology in higher education both as part of the teaching and grading process, but also the limitations in its application in higher education in the Republic of Serbia, this paper outlines the possibilities which the Moodle platform offers for the definition and use of online self-assessment tests and quizzes in the preparation and simulation of the entrance exam for the Faculty of Economics of the University of Niš. To indicate the importance of egrading for the increase in the effectiveness of learning, the paper analyses the number of created accounts and the number of visits, while a statistical analysis of the candidates′ results on the simulated entrance exam, from 2014 to 2016, was used to test the hypothesis on the significance of formative assessment for effective learning. The obtained t-test results indicate that formative assessment in this specific instance contributes to the improvement of the candidates’ learning process and that the application of such a means of student self-assessment in other areas of study would significantly contribute to the increase in the effectiveness of learning. On the other hand, statistical analyses of individual responses to questions represent a significant source of feedback for teachers, which can be used for the purpose of redefining tests.
p>Examination of Higher Education literature concerning student retention reveals a variety of influences from student satisfaction, professors’ engagement and/or approachability with students. However, as with most complex issues there appears to be multiple causes for student disengagement. This paper presents a “service marketing” approach to understanding student retention. If a university system is couched in terms of multiple, interactive service encounters, are there interactions which take place on a campus which would lead to a students’ satisfaction/dissatisfaction with that University? The results indicate that this is in fact true. While the student-teacher interaction is still critical to retaining students, additional interactions with support staff also emerge as having significant impact on the retention of students. Implications for “customer service” training across all venues within a University are discussed.</p
Executive Summary
There are countless illustrations where companies are involving their customers in the creation of products and delivery of services, commonly viewed as co-creation of value (CCV). The present work explores the value co-creation concept in the house construction business that requires maximum customer engagement with the service provider as compared to other subsectors in the real estate.
With this background, the present study examined the comprehensive framework of antecedents and consequences of CCV leading to customers’ recommendation in the housing sector. Moreover, the effect of CCV on customers’ recommendation of a service provider is also studied by analyzing the role played by relational value and customized offerings.
One of the main findings of the study is that the three pre-conditions, namely customer participation, customer expertise, and resource integration, significantly affect CCV. It was also found that when customers are allowed to participate and are provided with more choices, it leads to a higher level of trust. Thus, CCV has a significant impact on trust. Customers usually promote a service provider through positive word-of-mouth and make actual recommendations to others when he is able to ensure satisfactory services. Hence, the direct relationship of customer satisfaction with recommendation turns out to be significant. Another highlight of the study is that value co-creation is a platform where customers should proactively participate and architects must give shape to this proactiveness by acknowledging their ideas and suggestions. Any ignorance in this process may bring in negative effect of relational value on customer recommendation. Moreover, the effect of trust on customer recommendation is completely mediated by relational value.
Thus, the results of the study have some important implications for an architect. Customers ought to be provided with innovative and unique architectural designs such as inspiration taken from different western countries and fusion for bringing variety. Also, an architect should check the feasibility of designs and execution of the plan. An architect can create value from other resource partners involved in the network, that is, by giving reference of the best suppliers for accessories like modular fittings to be used in the kitchen or washroom. Relational value can be created by motivating customers as well as involving customers’ family members in key discussions. Also, being empathetic and understanding about any special need of the customer has a profound impact on the relational value. The customer should be periodically assured about the timely execution of the plans drafted since the completion of a house not only depends on the services of an architect, but also involves a whole network of resource partners, that is, appropriate material, labour, and other suppliers.
Architectural firms often have difficulty generating profit from their services as they pursue not only commercial but also professional goals. These goals frequently conflict and have to be balanced during the process of value creation and value capture. So far, literature has focused on the interaction between the perceived use value for the customer and the fee that is paid to the firm. To better understand how professional service firms realize their organizational targets, professional value needs to be included. In this study, in-depth interviews with the architects and clients of nine housing projects provide insight into the content and process of value capture by architectural firms. The data reveal strategies by which architects tried to maximize the capture of professional value at the expense of profit or sometimes even their clients’ perceived use value. These trade-offs in value capture confirm the importance of professional value when studying value creation and capture in a professional service context. This paper provides an understanding of how architectural firms struggle to balance competing goals and highlights the importance of well-managed value capture.
Students studying at universities in England have been defined as customers by the government since the introduction of student tuition fees. Although this approach has been rejected by educators, there is a lack of empirical evidence about the extent to which students express a consumer orientation and its effects on academic performance. These issues were examined in the current study by surveying 608 undergraduates at higher education institutions in England about their consumer attitudes and behaviours, in relation to the higher education, learner identity, and academic performance. The analysis revealed that consumer orientation mediated traditional relationships between learner identity, grade goal and academic performance, and found that a higher consumer orientation was associated with lower academic performance. Furthermore, responsibility for paying tuition fees and studying a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics subject were associated with a higher consumer orientation and subsequently lower academic performance. Implications for academic performance are discussed.
Recent developments in marketing and service research highlight the blurring of boundaries between firms and customers. The concept of customer engagement (CE) aggregates the multiple ways customer behaviors beyond transactions may influence the firm. However, the term is embryonic and academics and practitioners alike lack understanding on how CE contributes to value co-creation. This article marks the first attempt to conceptualize the role of customer engagement behavior (CEB) in value co-creation within a multistakeholder service system. We combine the theoretical perspectives of CE and value co-creation research to the analysis of a rich case study of a public transport service system involving consumers, communities, businesses, and governmental organizations. Our findings describe drivers for CEB, identify four types of CEB, and explore the value outcomes experienced by various stakeholders. This article proposes that CEB affects value co-creation by virtue of customers’ diverse resource contributions toward the focal firm and/other stakeholders that modify and/or augment the offering, and/or affect other stakeholders’ perceptions, preferences, expectations, or actions toward the firm or its offering. Through inducing broader resource integration, CEB makes value co-creation a system-level process. We offer nine research propositions explicating the connections CEB has to value co-creation by focal customers, the focal firm, and other stakeholders. Our research suggests that firms should focus greater attention on the resources that customers can contribute, explore the potential to engage diverse stakeholders around a common cause, and employ organically emerging systems that provide opportunities for more extensive value co-creation.
This article examines the extent to which university administrative staff perceive academics and students as customers. These perceptions have an effect on the provision of quality customer service. The role of administrative staff in the educational experience for students has been generally ignored in academic research. A discussion of quality service provision in higher education can be enhanced by a consideration of the perceptions held by administrative staff of academics and students as customers. Administrative staff perceptions were analysed by surveying staff from Curtin University's Academic Registrar's Office (ARO). Findings of this survey indicate that administrative staff have ambivalent feelings towards academics as customers and highlight interpersonal skills between the two groups as a major challenge in facilitating quality customer service. In dealing with students, administrative staff move beyond the processes of mere service-providers and incorporate a mentor role into their processes. Administrative staff tend to relate closely to students, perceiving them as internal customers.
The bottom line in academics feeling uncomfortable about regarding students as customers is the impression that from a marketing view ‘the customer is always right’. While Australian universities have not yet undergone a ‘customer care revolution’, it is important that educators and educational managers better understand how a marketing perspective can assist them to operate effectively within a market environment. Good service provision does not necessarily mean ‘doing everything the customer wants’ so much as bringing the expectations of the service provider and the customer closely into line. As an important first step towards doing so, educators and educational managers would do well to devote more attention to ascertaining just what the expectations of their customers are. The literature on professional services marketing distinguishes the professional service in question from the manner in which it is marketed. To be taken seriously in ongoing policy debates regarding the transformation of higher education academics might do well to develop a greater professionalisation as educators in addition to that as subject experts.
Defining sense of community as a feeling of belongingness within a group, this article reviews research about students' sense of acceptance within the school community to address three questions: Is this experience of belongingness important in an educational setting? Do students currently experience school as a community? And how do schools influence students' sense of community? Conceptually, the review reflects a social cognitive perspective on motivation. This theoretical framework maintains that individuals have psychological needs, that satisfaction of these needs affects perception and behavior, and that characteristics of the social context influence how well these needs are met. The concern here is how schools, as social organizations, address what is defined as a basic psychological need, the need to experience belongingness. The findings suggest that students' experience of acceptance influences multiple dimensions of their behavior but that schools adopt organizational practices that neglect and may actually undermine students' experience of membership in a supportive community.
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to analyze the scope, content and nature of value co‐creation in a service logic‐based view of value creation, addressing the customer's perspective in a supplier‐customer relationship. The nature of the activities and the roles of the supplier and the customer in value creation and co‐creation are analyzed. Furthermore, the purpose is to discuss what implications for marketing can be derived from this analysis.
Design/methodology/approach
The article analyzes the marketing implications that follow from the pivotal role of interactions in service provision. The article, thus, builds on a long history in service marketing research pointing at the impact on the content and scope of marketing of customer‐supplier interactions.
Findings
In this article, it is concluded that creating customer value is a multilaned process consisting of two conceptually distinct subprocesses. These are the supplier's process of providing resources for customer's use and the customer's process of turning service into value. The article results in five service logic theses which provide an understanding of the process of value creation and its implications for marketing. The theses offer a terminology that helps researchers and practitioners to understand the various roles of suppliers and customers in value creation and to analyze opportunities for co‐creation of value.
Originality/value
The findings of this article challenge some of the salient propositions of the emerging service‐dominant logic, i.e. customers as co‐creators of value, and firms can only make value propositions. The role of marketing is reframed beyond its conventional borders.
Emergent perspectives in marketing highlight new opportunities for co-opting customers as a means to define and cocreate value through their participation. This study delineates and empirically tests hypotheses regarding the effects of customer participation (CP) on value creation and satisfaction for both customers and employees with different cultural value orientations in the context of professional financial services. Using data collected from 349 pairs of customers and service employees in two national groups (Hong Kong and the United States) of a global financial institution, this study examines how (1) CP drives performance outcomes (i.e., customer satisfaction, employee job satisfaction, and employee job performance) through the creation of economic and relational values and (2) the effects of CP on value creation depend on participants' cultural value orientations. Promoting CP could be a double-edged sword for firms: CP enhances customers' economic value attainment and strengthens the relational bond between customers and employees, but it also increases employees' job stress and hampers their job satisfaction. Moreover, the effects of CP on value creation depend on the cultural values of both customers and service employees; this result implies that arranging customers and service employees with "matched" cultural value orientations could facilitate the creation of value through CP.
This paper focused on issues of retention and the individual needs of international students at a southern university through videotaped group interviews with six students from Africa, China, India, Japan, Jordan, and Nepal. Students were asked questions concerning their first experiences at the university, experiences out in the community, academic issues and concerns, and other needs. Asking for and paying attention to the details that support international students in their quest to receive an American education will support the students where they need it and also provide an atmosphere that will encourage more international students to follow.
The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term “Social Media” exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.
The underpinning logic of value co-creation in service logic is analyzed. It is observed that some of the ten foundational premises of the so-called service-dominant logic do not fully support an understanding of value-co-creation and creation in a way that is meaningful for theoretical development and decision making in business and marketing practice. Without a thorough understanding of the interaction concept, the locus as well as nature and content of value co-creation cannot be identified. Value co-creation easily becomes a concept without substance. Based on the analysis in the present article, it is observed that the unique contribution of a service perspective on business (service logic) is not that customers always are co-creators of value, but rather that under certain circumstances the service provider gets opportunities to co-create value together with its customers. Finally, seven statements included in six of the foundational premises are reformulated accordingly.
Marketing inherited a model of exchange from economics, which had a dominant logic based on the exchange of "goods," which usually are manufactured output. The dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions. Over the past several decades, new perspectives have emerged that have a revised logic focused on intangible resources, the cocreation of value, and relationships. The authors believe that the new per- spectives are converging to form a new dominant logic for marketing, one in which service provision rather than goods is fundamental to economic exchange. The authors explore this evolving logic and the corresponding shift in perspective for marketing scholars, marketing practitioners, and marketing educators.
The paper is to examine the selection criteria by international students of their higher education at private higherlearning institutions in Malaysia. It focuses on factors which private international students considered importantin their decision of choosing Malaysia as their educational destination. A questionnaire was designed to include48 factors for selection of learning destination. Through judgmental sampling the data were solicited from 565international students using survey instrument. These were analyzed on principal components factor analysis toascertain factors related to their criteria to study in Malaysia. The results shown that six factors have a stronginfluence on international students’ decision-making process, namely, quality of learning environment,influencers, customer focus, cost, facilities, socialization and location. Further, through MANOVA, it was foundthat customer focus and facilities are the main factors used by respondents in their choice decisions. Thesefactors should be considered by colleges’ managers to develop their marketing strategies in attracting foreignstudents to enroll at their institutions. It is also important for positioning strategy and strengthening higherlearning institution offerings to the foreign market.
India may finally open its doors to foreign higher education institutions and investment. The cabinet has approved human resource development minister Kapil Sibal’s proposed law, and it will be voted in Parliament in the near future. Indian comment has been largely favorable.
As the globalization of the world economy continues, universities face the increasing challenge of being relevant. We explore the role of Market Orientation (MO) in helping universities align their internal resources, and thereby become more relevant to their stakeholders. Using the adapted Narver and Slater's (1990) measure items, we survey 3072 department chairs of computer science, engineering, and health science departments across the US. Our results show that MO is positively correlated to university commercialization. In a more surprising outcome, however, two dimensions of MO (Customer orientation and Inter-functional coordination) loaded on the same factor. Our results support the position that the external community, rather than students, represents the appropriate definition of a "university customer". Therefore, the appropriate emphasis of university MO is the external community. Using students (internal stakeholders) as end customers reduces the speed of absorption of information from the external environment. We suggest that the identification of the external customer will differ with each university, with a resulting differentiated effect on university's MO emphasis and relevance.
Firms are increasingly using social media to establish online communities where customers and other community members co-create new solutions. We describe how Finland's national airline, Finnair, succeeded in co-creating service ideas by using a variety of social media technologies and "socialization tactics" to help ensure that community members identified with the company's image and engaged in dialogs that were aligned with both company and customer needs.
Increasingly organizations are recognizing the value of establishing close relationships with their customers. Despite this, research has not deeply explored how the intangible aspects of relational exchange such as customer satisfaction, as well as affective commitment, calculative commitment, and trust, combine to determine loyalty in the higher-education sector. This is in part a result of reluctance within the sector to view students as customers of institutional brands. This research uses a structural equation modeling approach and a sample of 474 students to examine, first, the determinants of loyalty within the higher-education sector and, second, the role of relationship strength as a moderator of those determinants. The results indicate that student loyalty was most strongly determined by psychological attachment, and a sense of belonging to the brand. Student satisfaction, while a contributing determinant, alone was insufficient in generating loyalty. The results also indicated that students rejected the notion of loyalty determined by inertia and high switching costs. In addition, trust was not found to be a strong determinant of recommendation or return. Importantly, while relationship strength has been found to determine loyalty in other service contexts, the drivers of loyalty remained the same despite the strength of the relationship that students perceived that they had with their institution. The findings of this study suggest the need for a more comprehensive, involved, and proactive strategy to developing, managing, and maintaining the student-university relationship. The study also encourages the sector to adopt a relationship marketing approach to the management of higher-education services.
Advocating a customer focus, the Total Quality Management model of leadership has led to success in raising performance levels throughout various manufacturing and service industries. Many education stakeholders, however, are resistant to the notion that postsecondary students benefit from being treated like customers. While many critics oppose the traditional business philosophy that ‘the customer is always right' and maintain that pandering to students' short-term demands is damaging to the learning process few studies explore alternative notions of what it means to ensure student satisfaction. This paper promotes a conceptual interpretation that is not governed by the philosophy that ‘the customer is always right’.
With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of product information. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically published for a single product makes harder for individuals as well as manufacturers to locate the best reviews and understand the true underlying quality of a product. In this paper, we reexamine the impact of reviews on economic outcomes like product sales and see how different factors affect social outcomes such as their perceived usefulness. Our approach explores multiple aspects of review text, such as subjectivity levels, various measures of readability and extent of spelling errors to identify important text-based features. In addition, we also examine multiple reviewer-level features such as average usefulness of past reviews and the self-disclosed identity measures of reviewers that are displayed next to a review. Our econometric analysis reveals that the extent of subjectivity, informativeness, readability, and linguistic correctness in reviews matters in influencing sales and perceived usefulness. Reviews that have a mixture of objective, and highly subjective sentences are negatively associated with product sales, compared to reviews that tend to include only subjective or only objective information. However, such reviews are rated more informative (or helpful) by other users. By using Random Forest-based classifiers, we show that we can accurately predict the impact of reviews on sales and their perceived usefulness. We examine the relative importance of the three broad feature categories: “reviewer-related” features, “review subjectivity” features, and “review readability” features, and find that using any of the three feature sets results in a statistically equivalent performance as in the case of using all available features. This paper is the first study that integrates eco- - nometric, text mining, and predictive modeling techniques toward a more complete analysis of the information captured by user-generated online reviews in order to estimate their helpfulness and economic impact.
The purpose of this study was to investigate students' perceptions of services, interactions, and experiences in the College of Education and Psychology at a research-intensive university located in the southern region of the United States. Data were collected relative to participants' perceptions for university experiences and services. The constructs included academic advising, social connectedness, involvement and engagement, faculty and staff approachability, business procedures, learning experiences, and student support services. The results of the study indicated that students who did not return for the Fall 2008 semester or changed majors to another area had statistically significant lower perceptions of social connectedness and satisfaction with faculty approachability than students who returned.
Intense competition for full-fee-paying foreign students in higher education in many countries mandates the need for the identification of the criteria considered important by this customer group for the purpose of strategy development. Past research in this area has overlooked the needs of this important segment and has focused mainly on either administrators or the faculty’s perspective. A sample of potential students from Indonesia participated in this study and a number of choice criteria were identified. Also discusses strategic implications.
This research employs institutional characteristics and market-related factors to predict undergraduate students' tuition at 190 private colleges and universities in the USA. Results showed that the strongest correlations among variables for college tuition were reputation ranking and SAT scores. Results of a hierarchical multiple regression revealed that the type of institution, academic reputation ranking, the annual expenditures, geographic region, the existence of professional schools, the size of the faculty and the undergraduate student body, and university presidents' pay and benefits are all significant predictors of college tuition. After controlling all other variables, the unique contribution made by reputation ranking is still a significant predictor of college tuition. Research institutions charged their students more than liberal arts colleges, which, in turn, charged more than doctoral granting I institutions. Implications for parents and students, private colleges and universities, human resource management, and the Matthew effect are discussed.
Many adults worry about children and teenagers’ online privacy, predominantly due to a perception that youth put themselves at risk for harassment and solicitation by revealing personal information, usually to marketers or on social networking sites (Aidman 2000; Giffen 2008; Read 2006). First, commercial websites and advertising networks are said to manipulate children into providing personal data which is bought, sold, and used for monetary gain (Cai & Gantz 2000; Montgomery & Pasnik 1996; Moscardelli & Liston-Heyes 2004; Youn 2009). Second, recent privacy worries are centered around secrecy, access, and the risks that “public living” on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube poses from educational institutions, future employers, pedophiles, and child pornographers (Palfrey et al. 2008; Lenhart & Madden 2007; Youn 2009). These concerns can translate to blaming youth for their carelessness, with the frequently-cited maxim that “youth don’t care about privacy” (Kornblum 2007; Nussbaum 2007; Moscardelli & Liston-Heyes 2004). At the same time that youth are castigated for their openness, children and teenagers are under increasing surveillance at home and school, facilitated by Internet filters, mobile phones, and other monitoring technologies (Berson & Berson, 2006; Hope, 2005). Often, young people are viewed on one side of a generational divide (Herring 2008). “Millennials” or “digital natives” are portrayed as more comfortable with digital technologies and as having significantly different behaviors than their “digital immigrant” parents (Palfrey & Gasser 2008; Solove 2008; N. Howe & Strauss 2000). There is a risk of this discourse exoticizing the experience of young people from an adult perspective, given the fact that adults perform most of the research on young people, create the technologies that young people use, and produce media commentary on children and teenagers (Herring 2008). Much of the popular media’s commentary on young people lumps children and teenagers together using a “generational” rhetoric that flattens the diverse experiences of young people in different contexts, countries, class positions and traditions. For many of today’s young people, peer socialization, flirting, gossiping, relationship-building, and “hanging out” takes place online (boyd 2008; Ito et al. 2008; Herring 2008). Young people primarily use online technologies to talk with people they already know. Sharing information through social network sites or instant messenger reinforces bonds of trust within peer groups. The idea of two distinct spheres, of the “public” and the “private,” is in many ways an outdated concept to today’s young people. Much of the studies of privacy online focus on risk, rather than understanding the necessity of private spaces for young people where they can socialize away from the watching eyes of parents or teachers. These seeming contradictions demonstrate how understandings of risk, public space, private information, and the role of the Internet in day-today life differ between children, teenagers, parents, teachers, journalists, and scholars. The scope of this literature review is to map out what is currently understood about the intersections of youth, reputation, and privacy online, focusing on youth attitudes and practices. We summarize both key empirical studies from quantitative and qualitative perspectives and the legal issues involved in regulating privacy and reputation. This project includes studies of children, teenagers, and younger college students. For the purposes of this document, we use “teenagers” or “adolescents” to refer to young people ages 13-19; children are considered to be 0-12 years old. However, due to a lack of large-scale empirical research on this topic, and the prevalence of empirical studies on college students, we selectively included studies that discussed age or included age as a variable. Due to language issues, the majority of this literature covers the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Canada.
Educational institutions worldwide are undergoing fundamental shifts in how they operate and interact with their “customers”: students, alumni, donors, faculty members and staff members. Kotler and Fox1 state that “the best organization in the world will be ineffective if the focus on ‘customers’ is lost. First and foremost is the treatment of individual students, alumni, parents, friends and each other (internal customers).” Higher education is in much the same position with CRM as it was in with ERP—just far enough behind the commercial sector to gain from the lessons learned and the maturation of the technology. Departments and offices work as separate entities in many colleges and universities today. CRM solutions aim to eliminate the organization stovepipes that hamper proactive customer interaction. CRM applications are also designed to increase the effectiveness of staff members who interact with customers or prospects. The use of CRM applications can lead to improved customer responsiveness and a more comprehensive view of the entire “cradle-to-grave” customer life cycle. CRM solutions that tie directly into ERP systems are particularly powerful because institutions can take customers through a closed-looped set of well defined steps and processes to satisfy their needs. Whereas CRM applications provide the framework for embodying, promoting and executing best practices in customer-facing activities; ERP provides the backbone, resources and operational applications to make organizations more efficient in achieving these goals.
This study used a specially designed questionnaire to explore undergraduate students' expectations of and preferences in teaching, learning and assessment. A convenience sample of 395 first-year university undergraduates at the start of their university life was used. They were enrolled on a Medical, Business Studies or Psychology degree course at one of three British universities. Overall, the similarities in expectations and preferences between the three groups were greater than the differences. Specifically, the students expected to be taught by formal and interactive lectures but preferred to be taught by interactive lectures and group-based activities. Their least favoured learning methods were formal lecture, role-play and student presentations. Coursework assessment preference was for essays, research projects and problems/exercises. Although there was an overall preference slightly in favour of coursework assessment rather than examinations, this was not consistent across all three centres. Students asked to rate various qualities of a good teacher selected 'teaching skill', followed by 'approachability' as the most important. The effective collection and value to institutions of students' expectations is discussed.
With the rapid growth of the Internet, the ability of users to create and publish content has created active electronic communities that provide a wealth of product information. However, the high volume of reviews that are typically published for a single product makes harder for individuals as well as manufacturers to locate the best reviews and understand the true underlying quality of a product. In this paper, we re-examine the impact of reviews on economic outcomes like product sales and see how different factors affect social outcomes such as their perceived usefulness. Our approach explores multiple aspects of review text, such as subjectivity levels, various measures of readability and extent of spelling errors to identify important text-based features. In addition, we also examine multiple reviewer-level features such as average usefulness of past reviews and the self-disclosed identity measures of reviewers that are displayed next to a review. Our econometric analysis reveals that the extent of subjectivity, informativeness, readability, and linguistic correctness in reviews matters in influencing sales and perceived usefulness. Reviews that have a mixture of objective, and highly subjective sentences are negatively associated with product sales, compared to reviews that tend to include only subjective or only objective information. However, such reviews are rated more informative (or helpful) by other users. Further, reviews that rate products negatively can be associated with increased product sales when the review text is informative and detailed.By using Random Forest based classiers, we show that we can accurately predict the impact of reviews on sales and their perceived usefulness. We examine the relative importance of the three broad feature categories: 'reviewer-related' features, 'review subjectivity' features, and 'review readability' features, and find that using any of the three feature sets results in a statistically equivalent performance as in the case of using all available features. This paper is the first study that integrates econometric, text mining, and predictive modeling techniques toward a more complete analysis of the information captured by user-generated online reviews in order to estimate their helpfulness and economic impact.
Customer participation in the production of goods and services appears to be growing. The marketing literature has largely focused on the economic implications of this trend and has not addressed customers' potential psycholog- ical responses to participation. The authors draw on the social psychological literature on the self-serving bias and conduct two studies to examine the effects of participation on customer satisfaction. Study 1 shows that consistent with the self-serving bias, given an identical outcome, customer satisfaction with a firm differs depending on whether a customer participates in production. Study 2 shows that providing customers a choice in whether to par- ticipate mitigates the self-serving bias when the outcome is worse than expected. The authors present theoretical and practical implications and provide directions for further research.
This study investigates the relationship between perceived brand fit and intention to purchase in the context of a co-branded hotel-restaurant. In particular it examines if co-branding of a hotel in a Thai hotel chain with an independently owned theme restaurant stimulates intention to purchase among hotel guests. This study was conducted using a survey of hotel guests in public areas on the hotel premises. Data regarding guest perceptions of brand fit was analysed using multiple regression and the chi-square test. The findings indicate that two components of perceived brand fit, namely perceived fit (overall) and complementary fit (in terms of product usage and product goals), are statistically significant and positively related to intention to purchase. Theoretical conclusions regarding a co-branding model are discussed and managerial implications for development of an appropriate hotel-restaurant co-branding marketing strategy are provided.
Purpose: Several trends such as improved access to health care information via the internet, the growth of self-help groups and expenditure on alternative medicine signals consumers are taking an active role in their own health management. Chronic illnesses such as diabetes and asthma require a significant amount of self-management and thus call for a collaborative patient-physician relationship. This study explores whether empowering patient-physician consultations measured through three patient empowerment dimensions (patient control, patient participation, physician support) enhance patients trust in and commitment to their physician.
The paper addresses the issue of student participation from the perspective of the health-promoting schools initiative. It draws on experience from the Macedonian Network of Health-Promoting Schools and its collaboration with the Danish as well as other country networks within the European Network of Health-Promoting Schools. Student participation is viewed as one of the main focal points of the conceptual framework and model of a health-promoting school developed within the Macedonian context. This model and the model distinguishing between two different qualities of participation-genuine and token participation-are presented and discussed in the paper. Underpinning values that these models endorse as important for the processes of health promotion in schools include self-determination, participation, democracy, diversity and equity.
This paper examines patterns of alumni giving, using data on two cohorts of former students from a sample of private colleges and universities. Higher levels of contributions are associated with higher income, whether or not the person graduated from the institution where he or she first attended college, and the degree of satisfaction with his or her undergraduate experience. Their satisfaction in turn was a function of particular aspects of that experience, including whether there was someone who took a special interest when he or she was enrolled there. Among the more recent cohort of graduates, those who had received need-based aid tended to give less and those who were related to former alumni tended to give more.
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