Warranty servicing strategies to improve customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction with a purchased product depends on its performance under warranty and during the remainder of its useful life. Dissatisfaction with an item is important to a manufacturer since it can lead to the loss of potential customers through the negative word-of-mouth effect as well as existing customers switching to a competitor. In this paper, we define satisfaction in terms of the likelihood of a customer not switching to a different manufacturer when a new item needs to be purchased. Manufacturers can use specific servicing strategies to reduce warranty costs and this topic has already been addressed in the literature without considering the effect of customer dissatisfaction. In this paper, we propose particular strategies that will increase customer satisfaction and we discuss methods for obtaining the optimal parameters of these strategies.

Using a matrix in life transition research

Life transitions can be planned or can occur unexpectedly. They can cause a major change to a person's life patterns and well-being. Older adulthood is a time for many life transitions as a result of changes in life roles and health status. In this exploratory study, the authors investigate the transition involved in driving cessation for older people. In analyzing and organizing the data, they develop a matrix that incorporated descriptive and temporal factors associated with the transition. This matrix is useful in organizing and communicating the findings as a whole and could be used in describing individual experiences. It might be of use for the organization of qualitative data about other life transitions such as illness, retirement, and the development and adoption of new behaviors.

Graphic satire and public life in the age of terror

This paper investigates media representations of international insecurity through a selection of newspaper cartoons from some of the major daily Australian broadsheets. Since 2001, cartoonists such as Bruce Petty, John Spooner and Bill Leak (in The Age and The Australian) have provided an ongoing and vehement critique of the Australian government’s policies of ‘border protection’, the ‘war on terror’ and the words of mass distraction associated with Australia joining the war in Iraq. Cartoonists are often said to represent the ‘citizen’s perspective’ of public life through their graphic satire on the editorial pages of our daily newspapers. Increasingly, they can also be seen to be fulfilling the role of public intellectuals, defined by Richard A. Posner as ‘someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments and corporations’. Cartoonists enjoy an independence and freedom from censorship that is rarely extended to their journalistic colleagues in the print media and it is this independence that is the vital component in their being categorised as public intellectuals. Their role is to ‘question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s mental habits, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to re-examine rules and institutions’ (Posner, 2003: 31). With this useful — if generalised — definition in mind, the paper considers how cartoonists have contributed to debates concerning international insecurity in public life since 2001.

Formal performance appraisal interviews: Can they really be objective, and are they useful anyway?

This paper reports on a qualitative field study conducted in Australia which examined what is occurring in formal performance appraisal interviews in relation to their objectivity and resultant outcomes. Supervisors and subordinates who had recently been involved in performance appraisals were interviewed about their experiences of the process. Perceptions of the utility of, and satisfaction with the interview process were examined. Further, the effect of the relationship between the participants on objectivity was investigated. Results indicated that formal appraisal interviews were not perceived to be of great utility, and that the relationship of the participants influenced the interview.

Useful representations of series solutions for transport problems

Simple techniques are presented for rearrangement of an infinite series in a systematic way such that the convergence of the resulting expression is accelerated. These procedures also allow calculation of required boundary derivatives. Several examples of conduction and diffusion-reaction problems illustrate the methods.