Publications

June 2017 (Revised May 2018)
Supplement

Hilti Fleet Management Video Supplements

By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, Oliver Gassmann and Roman Sauer

This case explores the introduction of fleet management in the construction industry by the premium power tools manufacturer Hilti in 2000. Following its customers’ needs, Hilti moved from selling power tools to leasing them as a service. The introduction of the new... View Details

28 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

How Racial Bias Taints Customer Service: Evidence from 6,000 Hotels

terms of business outcomes, they're not developing the best customer relationships they could.” Companies that fix disparities in their service delivery are likely to boost View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

October 2009 (Revised June 2011)
Case

Zappos.com 2009: Clothing, Customer Service, and Company Culture

By: Frances X. Frei, Robin J. Ely and Laura Winig

On July 17, 2009, Zappos.com, a privately held online retailer of shoes, clothing, and other soft line retail categories, learned that Amazon.com, a $19 billion multinational online retailer, had won its board of directors' approval to offer to merge the two companies.... View Details

Keywords: Mergers and Acquisitions; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Choices and Conditions; Governing and Advisory Boards; Service Delivery; Organizational Culture; Internet and the Web; Valuation; Apparel and Accessories Industry; Retail Industry

13 Mar 2017
Research & Ideas

Hiding Products From Customers May Ultimately Boost Sales

portion of your full product catalog—and leaving customers to wonder what you’ll offer next? Or is it better to display all your wares at once, in hopes of encouraging a shopping spree? For example, is a View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail; Fashion

09 Dec 2019
Research & Ideas

Identify Great Customers from Their First Purchase

School. By incorporating data most companies discard, Ascarza and her co-researcher devised an algorithm capable of quickly analyzing more than 40 variables to create a “first impression” of the customer after the initial transaction. The... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail; Service

21 Jul 2003
Research & Ideas

Don’t Get Buried in Customer Data—Use It

With the advent of customer relationship management (CRM) in the late 1990s, companies came to believe that by using technology to tailor their offerings to individual... View Details

Keywords: by Jean Ayers

June 2015 (Revised February 2017)
Case

Uber and Stakeholders: Managing a New Way of Riding

By: Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Daniel Fox

By 2015, technological innovations—the smartphone and the advanced data connectivity that enabled it—created new opportunities for people to move around cities quickly and conveniently without owning a car, via car-sharing services like Zipcar or new ride-sharing... View Details

Keywords: Uber; Ride-sharing; Sharing Economy; Transportation Network Company; Leadership And Change Management; Stakeholder Management; Managing Change; Leadership; Regulation; Smartphones; Web-enabled Application; Disruptive Technology; Startup Management; Entrepreneurship; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Transportation; Mobile Technology; Transportation Industry; Technology Industry

2025
Working Paper

Dynamic Personalization with Multiple Customer Signals: Multi-Response State Representation in Reinforcement Learning

By: Liangzong Ma, Ta-Wei Huang, Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers potential for optimizing sequences of customer interactions by modeling the relationships between customer states, company actions, and long-term value. However, its practical implementation often faces significant challenges.... View Details

Keywords: Dynamic Policy; Deep Reinforcement Learning; Representation Learning; Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment; Latent Variable Models; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Foreign Direct Investment; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

Read Now

15 May 2011
News

Career change can do a number on many relationships

03 Feb 2016
Research & Ideas

The State of Customer Service Leadership

examine the most up-to-date best practices and explain how companies can put a smile on customers’ faces and keep them coming back for more. In a recent interview, they explained some of their findings. Aisner: Why is it so important to look closely at leadership and... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Aisner; Retail

12 PM – 1 PM EDT, 19 Sep 2017
Webinars: Career

Navigate Conflict and Build Stronger Relationships at Work

Every day at work we navigate competing interests, clashing personalities, and limited time and resources. The most effective leaders know how important it is to be able to navigate difficult conversations and work through conflict to improve our relationships. View Details

September 2024
Exercise

Assessing the Value of Unifying and De-Duplicating Customer Data

By: Elie Ofek and Hema Yoganarasimhan

This exercise provides an opportunity for students to gain hands on experience with assessing the value of unifying various customer databases that a firm may have (e.g., across the different brands it markets) and of properly identifying customers to avoid duplication... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Measurement and Metrics; Analytics and Data Science; Value

Product R&D at many companies is a major bottleneck. The difficulty is that fully understanding the needs of just a single customer can be an inexact and costly process--to say nothing of the needs of all customers or even groups of them. In the course of... View Details

September 2022
Background Note

On CUE: The Quest for Optimal Customer Unit Economics

By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

Startups are often evaluated by how well they perform on unit economics, defined as the ratio of a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) to acquisition costs (CAC). A common target for unit economics, advocated by many VCs and analysts, is 3:1 (i.e., LTV/CAC=3). While there... View Details

Keywords: Unit Economics; Business Startups; Performance Evaluation; Customer Value and Value Chain; Customer Relationship Management; Analysis