Search

Masteroppgave(MSc) in Master of Science in Strategic Marketing Management - Handelshøyskolen BI, 2012 Customer participation represents numerous positive effects for companies in terms of productivity gains and profitability. It has in recent years emerged as a powerful tool for companies to customize their service offerings and engage the customers in marketing activities. Still, the increased demand for customization also requires a great deal of flexibility and adaptations, making the risk of service defections higher as well. The question is whether companies should encourage customers to participate in the service recovery process? This thesis examines the effects of customer participation in service production and –recovery in terms of how they respond to and attribute the outcome of a recovery situation. We also explore whether the type of customer-company relationship moderate the customers responses to participation. We investigate how the varying levels of customer participation throughout the process affect customers´ Satisfaction with the company, Perceived Justice, Loyalty and Satisfaction with the service recovery. These measures serve as the dependent variables in this study. We aim to illustrate customers’ attribution by contrasting respondents’ scores on Satisfaction with the company and Satisfaction with the recovery. The proposition is that participating customers may be satisfied with the recovery they contributed to, but not necessarily with the company’s effort. This thesis provides a thorough review of the state of research in customer participation, service recovery, perceived justice, attribution, relationship, and loyalty. Based on the review we develop seven hypotheses, and test these using 2(true relationship vs. no pseudorelationship) x 2(low participation in service production vs. high participation in service production) x 2(low participation in service recovery vs. high participation in service recovery), experimental design. The empirical testing was carried out using scenarios, with business students as respondents. The main findings of this study were that customer participation in service production has a positive effect on customers’ post-recovery scores of Satisfaction with the company, Perceived Justice and Loyalty. Customer participation in service recovery, on the other hand, showed negative tendencies on the same measures. In addition, we found that higher type of customer-company relationship has a positive effect on customer loyalty. We did not find support for this effect on the satisfaction measures, indicating that relationship influences’ loyalty on aspects beyond mere satisfaction.

The purpose of this study has been to test the use of gaze interaction in common everyday computer tasks, with the intent to suggest design guidelines for gaze interaction in Microsoft Windows 7. This has been done by organizing a user test with fifteen participants, using a self-made gaze interactive software called Discovery and a Tobii X60 eye tracker.Five demo applications have been created within the Discovery software, all utilizing gaze interaction. They are customized to reflect five user test tasks; playing a video game, exploring a picture gallery, doing drag and drop operations, browsing a web page and interacting with different Microsoft Windows controls. The four types of controls tested are command buttons, links, check boxes and sliders. Both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered during the user test.Through a discussion of the test results, we were able to suggest ten specific design guidelines for gaze interaction. These covers both the tested controls, drag and drop operations, automatic scrolling as well as the use of head gestures. Additional findings indicate that gaze interaction is more suitable for passive tasks such as reading with automatic scrolling, than for more physical tasks like doing drag and drop operations. To support gaze interaction, we found that current software will either require a major redesign or to be used in a combination with other interaction styles.Eye tracking technology has improved over the last years, becoming increasingly affordable and accurate. Through this study we have seen that gaze interaction has much to offer everyday computing. By recommending fundamental design guidelines we hope to aid software developers and designers in the development of future gaze interactive systems.

Oppgaven presenterer teknikker og implementasjon for sammenlikning av naboskap av proteiner i protein-protein interaksjons-nettverk.