If only we knew what the online customer knows
Who is your online customer? The newspaper reader? The savings account holder? The retail shopper? The service seeker? Each of these is driving ongoing efforts on the part of suppliers of all kinds in an attempt to better target,better serve, better retain, and better provide for customer needs in an online environment.
The proliferation of digital newspapers and the abundance of free online news sources have driven pundits to declare that the death of printed newspapers is not far off, even while large media organizations such as News Corp. continue to struggle with reinventing themselves for the Internet (The Economist,2006). Any such reinvention, however, would do well to consider the goals of online news readers and factors that influence their behavior. In one of the first formal studies in this area, Flavián, and Gurrea, present “The choice of digital newspapers: influence of reader goals and user experience.”Will you choose to read it online or in print?
What we know about our customers has traditionally been garnered through surveys, focus groups, registrations, and complaint records. But more and more organizations are finding that the best way to build lasting and valuable customer knowledge is by having your customers join fellow customers in online discussions. Lee, Cheung, Lim, and Sia, examine this phenomenon in “Understanding customer knowledge sharing in web-based discussion boards: an exploratory study.”After establishing the potential value of online knowledge sharing between customers, they examine the barriers and motivators that inhibit or encourage such sharing.
In their study of “Online retailing, product classifications, and consumer preferences,” Korgaonkar, Silverblatt, and Girard examine the relationship between product category and store type providing us with some new insights into differentiated customer preferences across these variables. Mäenpääuncovers new directions for focusing online banking services toward different consumer clusters in “Clustering the consumers on the basis of their perceptions of the Internet banking services.” Rowley treats us to “An analysis of the e-service literature: towards a research agenda.” This survey helps clarify the diverse literature dealing with online service provision and should provide a solid basis for researchers working in this area.
Moving from customer to content, Ozmutlu, Cavdur and Ozmutlu address one of the ongoing challenges in the study of search engine design and usage –the analysis of search engine logs to effectively identify and track of changes in search activity. Better understanding of user queries and user search behavior can lead to both better search engine design and better content design. Their article, “Automatic new topic identification in search engine transaction logs,” presents an approach that employs Dempster-Shafer Theory and genetic algorithms to determine when a change in topic focus has occurred.
This issue of Internet Research includes an article by the winner of the 2005 Emerald Group Publishing Outstanding Doctoral Research Award. Mamata Jenamani et al., in “Design benchmarking, user behavior analysis and link-structure personalization in commercial web sites,” take an innovative approach to the analysis of web site design and user behavior based on a Markov decision process model. Their work, incorporating theoretical models and the empirical study of Fortune 500 web sites, results in a benchmark to evaluate commercial web site design, a stochastic model to study and understand user behavior, an algorithm to personalize link-structure of a commercial web site, and a general framework to implement a link-structure personalization system. Further details about the award can be found at www.emeraldinsight.com/awards. Internet Research and Emerald Group Publishing continue to sponsor this award for 2006 and we look forward to bringing you the ground-breaking work of next year’s winner.
David Schwartz
