Develops a seven‐item scale to assess consumers’ external search activities and assessed the scale’s construct validity. Moreover, to examine the scale’s generalizability across various services, both things‐directed and people‐directed service settings are used. The findings suggest...

Purpose – This paper aims to argue that, traditionally, service recovery attempts have paid little attention to customer preferences. Despite attempts to recover the customer, firms generally do not know if the recovery solution is what the customer expects. Hence, the paper seeks to examine...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate marketing practices in professional service firms (PSFs). PSFs' marketing practices are not well understood, despite their increasing importance to economies worldwide and recognition of their unique characteristics and the marketing...

Information technology (IT) and, in particular, the Internet is dramatically impacting on the services sector. This paper specifically investigates the relative impact of several forms of Internet use on perceived performance for two groups of service organisations – retail service firms and...

Service providers are recognizing the importance of customer service and are investing considerable amounts of effort, time and other resources into training programs to improve customer service. Customers, on the other hand, are demanding greater levels of service. The importance of customer...

Numerous studies have made it clear that many businesses, both in Australia and overseas, have not yet adopted a marketing plan as a basic operational tool. A mail study was conducted to survey the use of marketing plans in different types of Australian companies. Analysis of the survey results...

Reports a study of the salesforce compensation practices in manufacturing companies which is the first of its kind undertaken in Australia. Australian companies rely heavily on salary as the main form of salesforce compensation, unlike in the USA where the majority of salespeople are rewarded...