• Health Policy and Management
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.140-156
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• 1999

The purpose of this article was to review the basic concept of the SERVQUAL scale and to evaluate its usefulness in health care settings. The SERVQUAL scale was developed by Parasuraman et al. in 1988. Its purpose was to provide an instrument for measuring the quality of service that would apply across a broad range of services with minor modifications in the scale. The SERVQUAL scale is based on gap theory, which indicates the difference between consumers' expectations and their assessment of the actual performance of a specific firm. It has five dimensions to define service quality. These dimensions include: (1) tangibles' (2) reliability' (3) responsiveness' (4) assurance' (5) empathy. While the SERVQUAL scale has been tested in a number of health care settings. the findings have been mixed. So. health care marketers should be cautious in their use of the SERVQUAL scale. However, it is rare to find instruments that are as well validated as SERVQUAL appears to be. As well the SERVQUAL scale provides valuable information about the quality of health care service.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.5 no.6
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• pp.351-359
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• 2005

Recently the researches pursuing for the efficiency of the whole field of society and economy through the introduction of ubiquitous technology have been made actively in IT industry. In this study we intend to suggest the technological development for supporting the online customer service support more effectively by trying out the new technology development introducing a new technology called ubiquitous technology to e-CRM related to the customer service support technology development of the financial firm, one of the service industry.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.95-116
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• 2006

Many SMEs have adopted ASP models which have brought various benefits to SMEs such as decreasing the total cost, using new IT technology, enhancing the maintenance, and implementing the information systems rapidly. Ministry of Information and Communication had implemented the ASP diffusion project for the ASP venders and SMEs between 2001 and 2003. As results of this project, various industries adopted the ASP applications of which the performance was enhanced, and then the competitiveness of the ASP vendors in Korea was increased. The purpose of this study is to make a strategy of the penetration into China market for ASP services which have competitive advantages. This study uses various research methods such as questionnaire survey, visiting SMEs in china and making interviews. This study shows the current status of Chines ASP market, the several cases of using ASP services, and questionnaire analyses(service recognition, service requirement and factors and infrastructure, business environment and supporting organizations etc) of ASP demand. And finally this study proposes several strategic considerations in entering China market and suggests several support policies for supporting Korean ASPs.

• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.17-38
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• 2018

Branded service encounters, in which various aspects of frontline employees are strategically aligned with the firm's brand positioning, can be achieved along several dimensions such as employee appearance, manner, and personality. While previous research has mainly focused on behavioral traits of employees, this research examines the employee's physical appearance in association with the brand personality trait across two studies. Study 1 shows that salesperson look-brand personality congruence enhances brand affect by inducing positive affect. Specifically, a brand-congruent look of a salesperson increases positive affect among customers by confirming their prior expectations about what a salesperson of a certain brand should look like as a brand representative. Study 2 reveals that the positive impact of salesperson look-brand personality congruence on brand affect is significant only for customers with high social anxiety whereas this effect disappears for those with low social anxiety. These findings extend previous research on branded service encounters by showing why and when frontline employees' physical appearance shapes customers' affective responses toward the brand.

• The Journal of Asian Finance, Economics and Business
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• v.7 no.12
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• pp.515-521
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• 2020

Work motivation is critical for ensuring sustainability of any business firm. Motivated personnel essentially helps an organization achieve its organizational goal and objective. Hence, it has become an essential duty for business managers and management committees to identify the motivating factors that would strongly affect their employees. The purpose of the current research is to identify which are the factors that motivate service employees most at their workplace in Bangladesh. The study has used survey questionnaires to collect data from service employees. Convenience sampling is used for data collection. A total of 240 questionnaires were distributed and 183 completed questionnaires were returned (response rate: 77%). The study used purposeful motivating factors, which are ranked (from 1 to 10) by the service employees according to the significance of the factors. Mean value is applied to determine the most crucial motivating factor, where the factor with lowest mean value is considered as the highest significant motivating factor. Results reveal that job certainty, career growth and advancement opportunity, and quality working environment have been the most crucial and influential motivating factors for the service employees. The study adequately underlines the necessity of motivational factors and provides some guidelines to keep employees motivated.

• Journal of Navigation and Port Research
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• v.31 no.5 s.121
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• pp.385-393
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• 2007

This study aims to verify the structural relationship among service orientation, employees' satisfaction and business performance primarily on the International Freight Forwarders. For carrying out the study, literature survey relating to service orientation, satisfaction and performance along with empirical analysis was carried out. Results of analyses were found to be as follows: first, International Freight Forwarder's service orientation has had influence on employees' satisfaction second, employees' satisfaction in the freight forwarding companies has had influence on financial performance.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.9
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• pp.47-57
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• 2015

Purpose - The aim of this paper is to investigate the explanatory power of the Pecking-order theory (the cost of financing increases with asymmetric information) among Korean retail firms from the perspective of debt capacity. According to the Pecking-order theory, a firm's first preference is to use internal funds for its capital needs, its next preference is the issuance of debt, and its last preference is the issuance of equity; this is due to the information asymmetry problem between existing shareholders and investors. However, prior empirical studies, such as Lemmon and Zender (2010), argue that the entire sample test for the Pecking-order theory could be misleading due to the different levels of debt issuance capability of each of the individual firms; in fact, they confirm that the explanatory power of the Pecking-order theory improves after taking into account the differences in debt capacity of the U.S. firms they examined. This paper implements a case study approach among Korean retail firms to examine the relationship between debt capacity and the explanatory power of the Pecking-order theory in Korea. Research design, data, and methodology - This study uses the sample of public retail firms on the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) from the time period of 1990 to 2013. We gather related financial and accounting statements from the financial information firm WISEfn. Credit rating information is provided by the Korea Investor Service. We employ the models of Lemmon and Zender (2010) and Son and Kim (2013) to measure a firm's debt capacity. Their logit models use the rating dummy variable as a dependent variable and incorporate other firm characteristics as independent variables to estimate debt capacity. To test the Pecking-order theory, we adopt variants of the financing deficit model of Shyam-Sunder and Myers (1999). In the test of the Pecking-order theory, we consider all of the changes in total debt obligations, current debt obligations, and long-term debt obligations. Results - Our main contribution to the literature is our confirmation of the predicted relationship between debt capacity and the explanatory power of the Pecking-order theory among Korean retail firms. The coefficients on financing deficits become greater as a firm's debt capacity improves. This is consistent with the results of Lemmon and Zender (2010). The coefficients on the square of the financing deficits are also negative for the firms in the largest debt capacity group, which is also consistent with the predictions in prior literature. Conclusions - This study takes a case study approach by examining Korean retail firms. We confirm that the Pecking-order theory explains the capital structure of retail firms more appropriately, after taking into account the debt capacity of each firm. This result suggests the importance of debt capacity consideration in the testing of the Pecking-order theory. Our result also implies that there has been a potential underestimation of the explanatory power of the Pecking-order theory in existing studies.

• Journal of Technology Innovation
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.239-261
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• 2017

This paper analyzes how corporate product innovation affects firms' revenue and financial stability, and thereby draws the implications for the corporate strategy for sustainable growth. Corporate product innovation is defined as the development of new products within the firm, including bought-in products. Corporate revenue is measured by per capita sales and its growth rate, while financial stability is measured by debt-to-equity ratio and liquidity ratio. In the empirical analysis, the two-stage estimation method was used to control for the endogeneity of new product development. The data are drawn from the first (2005) to the sixth (2015) wave of the Human Capital Corporate Panel (HCCP) Survey, which are matched to the data from the Korea Investors Service (KIS). The results of the first-stage estimation indicate that product innovation of the firm is promoted by the firm's knowledge capital stock, human resources investment, and market-leading strategy. The second-stage estimation results indicate a positive relationship between the firm's level of activity in product innovation and short-term revenue (per capita sales and its growth), and financial stability (lower debt-to-equity ratio and higher liquidity ratio). These findings confirm that the firm's investment in technology innovation and subsequent product innovation are important strategies to enhance both short-term corporate revenue and long-term financial stability.

• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.12 no.8
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• pp.113-121
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• 2014

Purpose - Recently, the number of corporations that practice environmental and social responsibility, besides engaging in traditional profit-seeking activities, has been growing steadily, as interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is increasing. Recent research on CSR practices has identified the relationship between CSR activities and corporate value as one of the main issues in this respect. Considering that donations constitute a large proportion of a company's charitable activities, we considered the extent of donation expenses as a charitable activity in order to mitigate sample selection bias. Specifically, we analyzed the impact of donation expenses on firm value, while investigating if this impact varied in response to the level of corporate governance of firms. Research design, data, and methodology - We used non-financial firms listed on the Korean Stock Exchange, having their fiscal year end in December, and the sample period was 2006-2013. For the dependent variable, Tobin's q was used as the corporate value, and for the independent variable, donations were measured as the donation-expense-to-sales ratio. Corporate governance scores, as rated by the Korea Corporate Governance Service, were used to measure corporate governance levels because they consider the overall aspects of governance, including ownership structure, the board of directors, and the audit mechanism of individual companies. To examine the impact of donations on a company in relation to the level of corporate governance, we estimated regression models using the interaction terms of the governance dummy and donation variables. Then, we further estimated the regression models of two sub-samples that were classified according to the level of corporate governance. Similar to previous studies, the study uses variables that affect firm value, such as R&D expenditure, advertising expenses, EBITDA, debt-to-equity ratio, sales growth, company age, and company size as control variables. Results - The empirical results show that firm value significantly increased in response to an increase in donation expenses. Upon including the interaction terms of governance level dummy variables and donations, the coefficients of the interaction terms show significant positive values, while those of donation variables show significant negative values. In the strong governance sub-sample, the relationship between the donation expenses and corporate value was statistically positive (+) and significant. However, in the weak governance sub-sample, the relationship between the donation expenses and corporate value was statistically insignificant and negative (-). Conclusions - The empirical results suggest that donation expenses are significantly linked to an enhanced corporate value if firms have a good corporate governance structure. However, if the corporate governance structure is weak, the same relationship is not necessarily observed. The results of this study show that if a firm has high corporate governance, CSR practices enhance the company's reputation such that it has a positive (+) relationship with corporate value. If a firm has weak corporate governance, on the other hand, CSR practices are recognized as an agency cost and do not increase corporate value.

• Korea Science and Art Forum
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• v.20
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• pp.159-171
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• 2015

Service elements are added to the product to improve the company it its sales and innovation. The servitization process could take many different routes reflecting various properties of the manufacturing firm and its business contexts. Product-service systems (PSS) design method developed at Sungkyunkwan Universty, Service Design Institute, has been applied to a small furniture manufacturing company to demonstrate the utility of the method and to devise improvements. First, the business context of the company has been analyzed and key values have been identified. A co-creative session has been conducted to develop initial service concepts to drive those key values. The diverse positioning of those service concepts on the scale of service supporting product and service support customer is then developed to plan servitization phases. The specific service concepts are about company-customer relationship building as well as customization and personalization in this case. Initial service concepts are detailed with service blueprint so that prototyping and customer experience evaluation can be done. Business models in different servitization phases are designed. Further prototyping and customer experience evaluation has been done with business strategy improvements. In this paper, the proudct-service systems design method has been reviewed and the specific and real processes of the servitization using design will be described with discussion on the improvement of the method and the enhancement of the business.