As self-service technologies become more common in service provisions, a deeper understanding is needed of how customer satisfaction is affected by automated service encounters. Drawing from theories of customer satisfaction, human interaction, and the dynamics of complex service provisions, the differences between automated and interpersonal service encounters in the initial part of a service provision are examined in terms of customers? evaluation of the service encounter itself, overall satisfaction, as well as the service encounter?s impact on global evaluations and evaluations of other non-dependant service encounters. The study was performed on people travelling by air on Swedish domestic routes. Passengers were asked to evaluate the airline?s performance on different attributes of the air travel they had undertaken, as well as to form an overall evaluation of the service.

The main purpose of this master thesis is to identify the issues concerning the transformation process of a product oriented company into a service oriented company, and how these issues can be overcome. We will exemplify this by developing a dewatering pump rental concept for ABS, and identify the drivers and barriers for ABS when implementing the service oriented rental concept in Sweden and Poland. This master thesis is based on the systems perspective. The reason for this is the required holistic perspective, where the system has to be regarded from different points of departure in order to be understood. The theoretical studies include services and change management.

Internet commerce is nowadays a well known phenomenon. There is awareness that a lot of newly created companies operate their business through the Internet. You can see a tendency where many young people try to establish an Internet business with the hope of success and expansion on today?s fierce market rivalry. To achieve success, companies have to consider factors like business concept, logistic knowledge, future vision, resources and contacts when initializing their business.Having this in mind, we can clarify the purpose with this paper: ?To analyze in what way On-line shopping companies that sell consumer electronics, cell phones and music/entertainment products, have expanded? The paper is based on telephone interviews with three On-line shopping companies.

Services, no matter if they are established on the market or not, are often problematic since they are difficult to define for the customer. An example of such services is an real estate agent offers his or her service when it comes to all types of real estate. The purpose of the intermediation is to sell a costumers real estate to a buyer and act arbitrator between the two parties, this means that good communication is very important. To pin down what the service is all about and to know how to communicate is essential. When it comes to land and forest holding a special need of knowledge and experience is needed to be able to act professionally.

Grus i maskineriet ? en fallstudie om förbättringspotentialVäxeln AB, a company that provide sales, service and repair of industry gears, has contacted the authors of the essay and asked us to investigate in which areas of the company that has improvement potential. Persistent improvement is a recurring and up-to-date issue that many business leaders not put enough resources on. A big problem in many companies is the issue that there is no comprehensive view and therefore some of the workers tend to not follow the routines that are required for the whole system to work.The goal with the essay is to give Växeln AB advice on to which areas in the company that have improvement potential.We have used a qualitative method with mainly semi-structured interviews which has led to an inductive approach. 13 co-workers that work in different areas of Växeln AB have taken part in the interviews.

Background: outsourcing is one of the most obvious and continuous trends that has been able to study during the past ten years and also has had a strong development in the industry. What consequences will follow from an extended outsourcing? Purpose: the study?s overall purpose is to investigate what possibilities and risks that can be connected to an outsourcing decision and how the order of the service will handle the risks. The study will also investigate what management philosophy that will be used and regulate the outsourcing relation and how the company?s strategy will affect the decision and how the process of outsourcing will look like.

In 1996, the Swedish government deregulated the Swedish electricity market. As a consequence of the deregulation, Swedish customers could start to freely choose between different electricity companies. Different enterprises have tried various strategies in order to shape their image to attract new customers; often focusing on an image revolving around price and environmental friendliness.The purpose of this essay has been to analyze customers? relations to the electricity market. In order to analyze customers? relations a quantitative study has been conducted; focusing on customer satisfaction and customer commitment.

In the past decade there has been a considerable growth of contingent employment arrangements. In Sweden, the most common among these are the temporary-help service firms. The aim of this study is to investigate how the employees of temporary-help service firms experience their situation as employed by one company and working at another. We have used a qualitative approach to reach an increased understanding for the daily situation of the contingent worker. The essay is based on participant observations and semi-structured interviews with six contingent workers.

The purpose of this study is to perform an in-depth analysis of what effects a privatization of a service organization has on the management control system within the organization. The paper studies a service organization which provides service for the county council in Östergötland, Sweden. The result is based on interviews with several people, both within the acquiring private company and also within the county council in Östergötland, and analyzed using Samuelson?s (2005) framework from his study ?Organizational, Governance and Control ?. The major finding in the thesis is that the factors that have had the largest impact on the changes in management control are the new owner demands and the degree of operationalization of the overall goal..

To be able to protect themselves from credit risk, the banks must constantly check the performance of  the companies they have lent money to. There are many mathematical models for predicting financial distress. These models use accounting-based ratios, which often are historical and not representative for the present situation. This study describes how the banks do in practice to find signals of insolvency in time and the variables they are observing for doing that.In addition to financial reports which the company sends in to the bank at least once a year, also the relationship between them and information from different information  agencies are of great importance to track  signals of insolvency. Poor profitability is the primary cause of insolvency.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine whether Swedish, Internet-based travel agencies, acting on a consumer market are working towards creating added value for their customers. If that is the case, how and why do they use such a mode of operation.The theoretical framework was based on Grönroos´ ?Augmented service offering?, which treats added value as an addition to the core service. The services offered on five of the larger companies´ websites on the market were examined and 3 representatives of the five companies were interviewed.The study shows that 2 of the examined companies did not produce any added value, while 3 of the companies did produce added value for the customer. The added value was generated through packaging of core-, facilitating- and supporting services for the purpose of differentiating the company towards competitors and generating service fees..

Shareholder, who decides to continue with the company, can cause that they become per-sonally liable for its upcoming obligations. Creditors must lodge an appeal against the shareholder to get compensation for the harm they have suffered. The damage rules in Swedish company law are designed to utilize the company?s interest, that is, shareholders and other corporate members shall promote the interests of the company and not cause damage.The rules about compensation that shareholder obligates itself to are difficult to apply and are adapt to the specific cases. For a shareholder to be personally responsible in a real situation a company has to establish a subsidiary company, which is being driven undercapitalized, intended to benefit the shareholder.

Background: During the 2000s, there has been an increased interest in studying business management and strategy implementation with customer focus in public organisations. To achieve business goals it is important to continuously work with strategies to meet customerdemands for increased efficiency and service. Purpose: The aim of the essay is to examine how to work on strategy implementation in a municipal real estate company from a management perspective in order to achieve overall goals. Method: The study?s methodology is a case study based on qualitative telephone interviews that were conducted with representatives in managerial positions from various levels of the company.

During year 2007 ClaraHälsan Ltd bought the company health service Solstahälsan in Karlstad. The wide merger of the two health services the problems arose around the employees? employment agreements when certain parts of the agreement differ. At a transition of a company, in this case a health service, the rights and obligations for the employees will pass on to the new employer according to directive 2001/23/EG who came in force in the swedish legal system in year 1995. The former employer is only responsible vis-à-vis the employees ?for economic obligations related to the time before the transition, the code of protection of employment 6 b §.

Every business is subject to service failures. The process of correcting these failures and turning disappointed customers back into happy ones is called service recovery. This is particularly important in the hotel business, where there are many moments of truth where customers may become dissatisfied. To further complicate things, service recovery is a process where you may have to correct errors of others - people beyond your control. The research field is relatively new and there are no turn-key solutions as to how to systematically work with service recovery.