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To clarify their own thinking, gain confirmation, and plan, customers tell stories about their interactions with sales and service associates. These stories are told often via blog sites, social-media platforms (e.g. TripAdvisor) as well as informally to friends and family members. Read original first-person stories of problems, opportunities and outcomes with a multiple-choice exercise following each story, as well as a critical review by an independent researcher. This volume describes customers' reports of their experience of interactions with sales/service associates. Chapters also offer a descriptive theory of storytelling narratives of these encounters. Gain an international view with stories by Asian, European, New Zealand/Pacific Rim, and North American customers. The volume highlights small details that have significant impact on customer satisfaction enhancing the reader's abilities to detect nuances in multiple international contexts, understand how customers evaluate sales/service reps' behavior well as providing opportunities to solve real problems. This is a valuable book in the field of customer relationship management that is also interactive

Is the market for prisons or prisoners? The question remains unresolved by the debate between Sue Vardon, former Director‐General, Department of Correctional Services, South Australia, and Patrick Weller, former Chairman, Corrective Services Commission, Queensland, in the March issue of this journal. Both asked whether prisoners are customers or clients of corrective service agencies. The distinction between clients as customers and clients as consumers in service delivery has important implications for the performance management of prisons, yet was ignored in the Vardon/Weller interchange. This distinction has implications for prisons and public services generally.

PurposeIn many industrial contexts, firms are encountering increasingly uncertain demand. Numerous factors are driving this phenomenon; however, a major change that is spreading among different sectors is the ever‐growing attention to customers. Companies have identified that customers are critical not only because they directly influence the success of specific products or firms, but also because they play a fundamental role in many internal processes. Although the role of customers in business processes has been deeply analysed, the issue of demand forecasting and the role of customers has not been fully explored. The present study aims to examine the impact of heterogeneity of customer requests on demand forecasting approaches, based on three action research cases. Based on the analysis of customer behaviour, an appropriate methodology for each case is designed based on clustering customers according to their demand patterns.Design/methodology/approachObjectives are achieved by means of three action research case studies, developed in cooperation with three different companies. The paper structures a general methodology based on these three experiences to help managers in better dealing with uncertain demand.FindingsBy means of proper analysis of customers' heterogeneity and by using simple statistical techniques such as cluster analysis, forecasting performance can significantly improve. In these terms, this work claims that focusing on customers' heterogeneity is a relevant topic both for practitioners and researchers.Originality/valueThe paper proposes some specific guidelines to forecast demand where customers' differences impact significantly on demand variability. In these terms, results are relevant for practitioners. Moreover, the paper claims that this issue should be better analysed in future researches and proposes some guidelines for future works.

Limited information, time, or capacity may prevent customers from acting as utility maximizers when making purchase decisions. Rather, they would settle for a good enough option; that is, they stop searching and make a purchase as soon as they find an acceptable alternative. We incorporate this behavior in an assortment-optimization problem. Whereas different approaches to modeling customer choice are adopted in assortment planning, all assume customers are utility maximizers. Our work bridges the research streams of assortment planning and bounded rationality, particularly satisficing behavior. In addition, we define a limit for the search budget of customers, in which customers leave without purchase after examining a certain number of items. This assumption brings a new perspective to the assortment-planning literature, enabling us to capture the choice-overload effect. We prove that the firm's problem of finding the optimal assortment is NP-hard. We further establish certain structural properties of the optimal decision, which allows us to reformulate the model as a mixed-integer program. We analytically derive a tight upper bound on the percentage loss in the firm's expected profit for small instances when it assumes incorrectly that customers are utility maximizers. For larger instances, we take a numerical approach to determine the loss. Our results indicate that firms offering low-involvement products, among those dealing with satisficing customers, are more likely to face substantial profit loss if they ignore this behavior. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/deca.2022.0063 .

Abstract
Focusing marketing efforts on the most valuable customers so as to increase company profits is not as straightforward as it seems. There is a downside to customer prioritization such as negative reaction from low priority customers. Taking this into account we still show that prioritizing customers does lead to higher profitability and more return on sales. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it has a positive effect on the key characteristics of a firm's relationship with its elite customers while not affecting the lower level. Secondly, it reduces sales and marketing costs. Customer prioritization is more effective and efficient than equal treatment. We also show that firms can rely on six key levers relating to a company's organizational structure and processes, enabling proper implementation of customer prioritization.

Growing segment size and increasing affluence have resulted in a substantial increase in the purchasing power of the senior market. Seniors spend a higher proportion of their total expenditure on services relative to younger consumers, making them an important target market for many service providers. However, seniors' particular concern with the social aspects of service delivery has been recognized as an important managerial issue. To provide further insight into this issue, in-depth interviews and projective techniques were conducted with 60 Scottish seniors of diverse demographic profiles. The findings support previous research indicating that seniors may evaluate service encounters primarily according to the social benefits resulting from them. In the present study, the social benefits sought appeared to be largely determined by seniors' social identities, which were influenced by past experiences as customers and employees. A model of how seniors evaluate their service encounter interactions is suggested, and managerial implications and directions for further research are provided. In particular, the model emphasizes the need for service providers to appreciate the characteristics of frontline service staff that are conducive to satisfactory service encounters for seniors.