Customer orientation of sales personnel: Implications for service quality

Prior customer orientation research has concentrated mainly on studying the economical potential of customer orientation to companies. Service quality research instead has concentrated on emphasizing the evaluation of service quality from the customer’s perspective. This means that the service providers lack important information regarding customer orientation and service quality they would need for managerial purposes such as selecting and training employees. Therefore, there is an emerging need to study how customer orientation and service quality relate to company processes, policies and employees, and this study answers to those calls. The objective of this study was to examine what is the role of sales personnel’s’ customer orientation in quality of service delivery and what features support the development of customer orientation among sales personnel. Also the components customer orientation were studied extensively in order to understand how they relate to service quality. The empiric part of the study was conducted as a qualitative research by interviewing seven sales people from operative, tactical and strategic levels of the case corporation in order to get a broader view for customer orientation. The findings propose that both organizational factors and individual factors are affecting customer orientation construct inseparably. Organizational factors are bundled in this study under standards, support and systems, whereas individual factors are formed of employees’ personal attributes, motivation and self-perceived decision making authority. The findings suggest that in the service delivery process at an operative level, customer orientation appears largely in the employees’ individualistic characteristics. Their social and technical skills and motivation to serve customers are the most identifiable factors for customer orientation and consequently, quality service. However, organizational standards, support and systems are strongly dictating the frames the operative sales people operate in, having an influence on how the employees are experiencing their decision making authority and in the end, customer orientation. When looking at the service delivery process at tactical and strategic levels, customer orientation is affecting mainly in the organizational constructs through setting standards, support and systems. However, tactical and strategic level employees influence the operative level through individual customer orientation components as well. The findings indicate that their emotion and personal interaction skills are affecting the overall service delivery process mainly through supervisor support and motivation of the operative level employees. Based on this study it can be argued that an organization can operate as a facilitator and create certain frames for customer oriented sales behavior through standards, support and systems. However, as the impact of individual customer orientation factors on sales people’s service quality seems decisive, from an organizational perspective it puts pressures on the recruitment.

Rules of The National Library of Finland

Confirmed by the director of the National Library of Finland on 25 Nov 2013

Digital Humanities For Everyone’s Benefit?: interplay in social media with the great audience, high-esteemed researcher and self-conscious library

The National Library of Finland realizes the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages in 2012–15. The project is financially supported by the Kone Foundation. During this project the National Library of Finland has digitized and made available approximately 1200 monograph and more than 100 newspaper titles in several Uralic languages. The materials are available to both researchers and citizens in the National Library’s Fenno-Ugrica collection. The project will produce digitized materials in the Uralic languages as well as their development tools to support linguistic research and citizen science. The resulting materials will constitute the largest resource for the Uralic languages in the world. Through this project, researchers will gain access to corpora which they have not been able to study before and to which all users will have open access regardless of their place of residence. In my presentation, I will discuss 1) how we utilized the social media (Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte etc) to gain audience for our collection and 2) how the needs of researchers and laymen were met in crowdsourcing.

GABA-induced inactivation of Cebus apella V2 neurons: effects on orientation tuning and direction selectivity

We investigated the GABA-induced inactivation of V2 neurons and terminals on the receptive field properties of this area in an anesthetized and paralyzedCebus apella monkey. Extracellular single-unit activity was recorded using tungsten microelectrodes in a monkey before and after pressure-injection of a 0.25 or 0.5 M GABA solution. The visual stimulus consisted of a bar moving in 8 possible directions. In total, 24 V2 neurons were studied before and after blocker injections in 4 experimental sessions following GABA injection into area V2. A group of 10 neurons were studied over a short period. An additional 6 neurons were investigated over a long period after the GABA injection. A third group of 8 neurons were studied over a very long period. Overall, these 24 neurons displayed an early (1-20 min) significant general decrease in excitability with concomitant changes in orientation or direction selectivity. GABA inactivation in area V2 produced robust inhibition in 80% and a significant change in directional selectivity in 60% of the neurons examined. These GABA projections are capable of modulating not only levels of spontaneous and driven activity of V2 neurons but also receptive field properties such as direction selectivity.

Using Computational Fluid-Dynamics (CFD) for the evaluation of beer pasteurization: effect of orientation of cans

In-package pasteurization is the most used method for beer microbiological stabilization. The search for safer and better quality food has created a need to better understand the processes involved in producing it. However, little is known about the temperature and velocity profiles during the thermal processes of liquid foods in commercial packaging, which results in over-dimensioned processes to guarantee safety, decreasing the sensorial and nutritional characteristics of the product and increasing process costs. Simulations using Computational Fluid-Dynamics (CFD) have been used by various authors to evaluate those processes. The objective of the present paper was to evaluate the effect of packaging orientation in the pasteurization of beer in a commercial aluminum can using CFD. A heating process was simulated at 60 ºC up to 15 PUs (a conventional beer process, in which 1 Pasteurization Unit (PU) is equivalent to 1minute at 60 ºC). The temperature profile and convection current velocity along the process and the variation of the PUs were evaluated in relation to time considering the cans in the conventional, inverted, and horizontal positions. The temperature and velocity profiles were similar to those presented in the literature. The package position did not result in process improvement.

Kirjastojen ikkuna ulos maailmalle : Scandinavian Library Quarterly

Teema: Kansainvälisyys.

1964-65 Library Officers

Pictured here from left to right - Back Row: John Burtniak, Cataloguing. Nick Krenton, Head Cataloguing. Front Row: Sylvia Osterbind, Reference. Arthur Vespry, Chief Librarian. Mara Karnupe, Technical Services. Dianna Kertland, Circulation.

Glenridge Campus Library

View of the interior of the original library.