Real estate agent is a popular occupation that many young people study today. They enter the market and will have to compete with experienced real estat agents. Why should the customer choose them instead of those with more experience? We describe the character of services offered, expectations and customer satisfaction. We have chosen to give a questionnaire to customers and real estat agents.

Title: Strategies for competition ? a study of the Swedish contact lenses market.Authors: Pernilla AArskog and Annika Lange.Background: As a market gets more mature and the competition increases, it is more important for a company to apply the right strategic perspective. There are four fundamental strategic perspectives for a service-oriented business: a core product-, a price-, an image- and a service perspective. This study is a about service management and take its point from the theories from the Nordic School about strategies for competition, customer value, perceived customer quality and customer loyalty.Purpose: The main purpose with this study is to analyze and evaluate how the actors at the Swedish market of contact lenses should compete to gain further competitive advantages.Method: The study includes four qualitative interviews with two traditional opticians and two Internet based businesses, but also a survey with 106 contact lens users is included.Analysis: In the analyse part of this thesis it was concluded that the traditional opticians conception about their customer not agrees with what the customer evaluate as important. Many of the customers have thought about changing their optician, and besides that do not recommend their optician, and can there for not be categorize as loyal customers.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze how the mining equipment producers on a global market manage to handle the changing conditions concerning customer value. Our approach has been a comparative analysis between two different sites in order to answer the purpose. The case studies at Metso Mining have been made through interviews and visits at two geographical markets, South America and Scandinavia. The theoretical framework applied on our empirical findings is based on Blue Ocean Strategy, Customer Value and Resourced Based View. The empirical foundation is based on interviews with Metso Mining employees at Sorocaba in Brazil and Kiruna/Gällivare, Trelleborg and Staffanstorp in Sweden.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how customer oriented businesses can use loyalty programs to create loyalty and how loyalty can be increased. We have in this study chosen to refer loyalty program to the loyalty program that belong to the company Jula AB. Our study is written in a qualitative method. In our method, we chose to interview people in Jula organization to get a business perspective to our study. We have also chosen to assemble a focus group of Jula-club members to also get a customer perspective on the subject.

Background: Etiquette has become vital in business relationships. In today?s competitive business climate signs indicate that social competence affect whether a business deal is settled or not. This type of competence could be of crucial importance at a first business meeting and it also plays an important role for future business relationships. Business etiquette is therefore, within the world of business, an interesting area to study.Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to clarify what knowledge and understanding companies, listed on the Swedish stock exchange, possess towards business etiquette, their viewpoint on etiquette education and finally to ascertain whether or not those companies perceive business etiquette to be pivotal to success.Methodology: In order to attain our purpose of this essay we found it most suitable to utilize both a quantitative and qualitative research method.

Customer service has traditionally consisted of telephone, mail, and later on chat.But the entry of social media has changed the way companies exercise customerservice. Companies should ask themselves whether the same type of traditionalcommunication may or may not function in a new channel and thus whether itcan be applied to social media.The purpose of this study is to describe the companies? use of customer servicein social media and how the communication differentiates from thecommunication in traditional customer service, and also to define the effect onthe customers? relationship to the company. To reach our conclusions we havecombined theoretical references with qualitative interviews.By our analysis, we found that the communication in social media expandsthe possibilities. By entering an unfamiliar channel, customer service has hadto adapt themselves and their language.

The increased specialisation and complexity in products and services has created the need for Swedish companies to focus more on their core businesses. This has resulted in them opting to buy services and products that lie outside of their core business from consultancy businesses or other types of suppliers. When companies describe their offers in internal and external marketing it is done often in terms of company or service attributes that are not based on customer value or offered value for the customer. The reason for this is that companies have not adapted their services to the different needs of their customers. As a result of this, they run the risk of offering the same services as their competitors and communicate values that the customers either do not understand or experience as value adding.

The aim of this thesis is to describe the development of profitability and capital structure in Swedish quoted companies during the period of 1990 to 2004. Further, the aim is to determine the relationship between profitability and leverage in order to conclude whether the choice of capital structure supports the pecking order theory or the trade-off theory of capital structure. The findings show that return on assets fluctuates between 3 and 11 percent and that return on equity fluctuates between 3 and 22 percent during the period. Further, the leverage and the cost of debt have decreased. This indicates lowered financial risk in Swedish quoted companies in the period between 1990 and 2004.

Several studies have examined the effects of perceived justice of preferential treatments to customers, but few have studied these effects when customers have different input. The purpose of the study is therefore to enhance the knowledge and understanding of the effects of preferential treatments to customers with varying input. More specifically, the study focuses on how perceived justice, customer satisfaction and loyalty are affected depending on the customer's input and received treatment. An experimental study with 263 respondents showed that the perceived justice and loyalty intentions among both the receiver and the non-receiver of the preferential treatment were of highest level when it was given to a customer with large input. Customer satisfaction however, was found to be of highest level when customers themselves received preferential treatment, regardless of the size of their input.

Several studies have examined the effects of perceived justice of preferential treatments to customers, but few have studied these effects when customers have different input. The purpose of the study is therefore to enhance the knowledge and understanding of the effects of preferential treatments to customers with varying input. More specifically, the study focuses on how perceived justice, customer satisfaction and loyalty are affected depending on the customer's input and received treatment. An experimental study with 263 respondents showed that the perceived justice and loyalty intentions among both the receiver and the non-receiver of the preferential treatment were of highest level when it was given to a customer with large input. Customer satisfaction however, was found to be of highest level when customers themselves received preferential treatment, regardless of the size of their input.

Background: Knowledge of customer needs is a key factor in companies? struggle to develop successful products. Several studies illustrate that the main reason for failure in product development is lack of customer understanding. Lately considerable changes have occurred. Large-scale mass production is continuously being replaced by customer orientation, especially in the high technological market.

Web 2.0 is a relatively new concept which has made significant progress on the Internet. More recently, corporations as well have begun to get use of the different types of applications that are assigned to the Web 2.0. Organizations are primarily interested in making use of Web 2.0 in two areas: inside the company to increase efficiency and productivity, and from the organization to the customer to improve revenue and customer satisfaction. We have chosen to take a closer look at this last area, as can be seen as a CRM context. Our interest is to investigate how such a context may change by implementing some kind of Web 2.0 technology.

This thesis treats how accountancy companies works to maintain customer relations. This is getting more important in the accounting business because there are several inner and outer factors available that may affect customer relations in this business area. The main question with the thesis is: How works accountancy companies with keeping customers?The purpose with the research was to investigate and identify which inner and outer factors that may be important from a company perspective to keep customers. Another purpose was to investigate if there existed any differences between the companies in how they are handling different factors like for example a law change and how it could affect customer relations.

The purpose behind this study is to explore and explain the role of fear arousal when combined with the concept of customer satisfaction and retention in one marketing strategy. The major theories applied are the concept of fear appeals and the concept of customer satisfaction & customer retention. We chose to conduct our research through an ethnographic case study of KM. We did a qualitative study where we collected 10 interviews and we conducted observations. Our empirical data consists of academic articles from scientific journals, interviews andobservations.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is a technology that utilizes the temperaturedifference in oceans between the warm surface water and the cold water at 1000 m depthto produce electricity. The purpose of this report is to investigate if OTEC with its synergiescould become a commercially feasible energy solution for a small island. A literature reviewis conducted to explore the different OTEC technologies and to what extent the threesynergies; fresh water, air conditioning and aquaculture, could be used. In order to calculatethe profitability of these synergies there is also a study conducted on the conventionalmethods and cost of fresh water production, aquaculture and air conditioning. A model is setup using a scenario of a small tropical Island with population of 100 000 people.