US airlines say they're ready for record holiday travel
US airlines are gearing up for record traffic this holiday season, having beefed up staffing in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of last Christmas's operational meltdown.
Dec 21, 2023
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US airlines are gearing up for record traffic this holiday season, having beefed up staffing in the hopes of avoiding a repeat of last Christmas's operational meltdown.
Dec 21, 2023
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Just three days after Xfinity disclosed that 36 million of its users' personal information was exposed in a data breach, Fort Lauderdale-based Citrix Systems Inc. is facing a class-action lawsuit accusing the firm of failing ...
Dec 21, 2023
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Sirius XM Radio Inc. was sued by New York state for making it difficult for customers to cancel subscriptions to the broadcaster's online radio services, in violation of state and federal consumer protection laws.
Dec 21, 2023
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Adam Selipsky is shepherding Amazon's cloud unit at one of the most important moments in tech history.
Dec 11, 2023
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People seem to have little fondness for consumer service bots—so much so that even when an interaction with one is equal in speed and efficiency to that with a human, customers will still report dissatisfaction with the ...
Dec 7, 2023
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Google took its next leap in artificial intelligence Wednesday with the launch of project Gemini, an AI model trained to behave in human-like ways that's likely to intensify the debate about the technology's potential promise ...
Dec 6, 2023
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A suite of recent cybersecurity data breaches highlight an urgent need to overhaul how companies and government agencies handle our data. But these incidents pose particular risks to victim-survivors of domestic violence.
Dec 4, 2023
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Amazon is cutting hundreds of jobs in the unit that handles its popular voice assistant Alexa as it plows more resources into artificial intelligence.
Nov 18, 2023
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Technological innovation—especially disruptive innovation—is often heralded as the best strategy for a company. But new research published in Strategic Management Journal found that as competitors adopt new technology ...
Nov 16, 2023
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Want to buy a car on Amazon? Well, now you might get your chance.
Nov 16, 2023
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A customer (also known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is usually used to refer to a current or potential buyer or user of the products of an individual or organization, called the supplier, seller, or vendor. This is typically through purchasing or renting goods or services. However, in certain contexts, the term customer also includes by extension any entity that uses or experiences the services of another. A customer may also be a viewer of the product or service that is being sold despite deciding not to buy them. The general distinction between a customer and a client is that a customer purchases products, whereas a client purchases services.
In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 67 percent responded that they found customer metrics very useful.
Three metrics are used to count customers and track customer activity irrespective of the number of transactions (or monetary value of those transactions) made by each customer:
In contractual situations, it makes sense to talk about the number of customers currently under contract and the percentage retained when the contract period runs out. In non-contractual situations (such as catalogue sales), it makes less sense to talk about the current number of customers, but instead to count the number of customers of a specified recency.
The word derives from "custom," meaning "habit"; a customer was someone who frequented a particular shop, who made it a habit to purchase goods of the sort the shop sold there rather than elsewhere, and with whom the shopkeeper had to maintain a relationship to keep his or her "custom," meaning expected purchases in the future.
The slogans "the customer is king" or "the customer is god" or "the customer is always right" indicate the importance of customers to businesses – although the last expression is sometimes used ironically.
However, "customer" also has a more generalized meaning as in customer service and a less commercialized meaning in not-for-profit areas. To avoid unwanted implications in some areas such as government services, community services, and education, the term "customer" is sometimes substituted by words such as "constituent" or "stakeholder". This is done to address concerns that the word "customer" implies a narrowly commercial relationship involving the purchase of products and services. However, some managers in this environment, in which the emphasis is on being helpful to the people one is dealing with rather than on commercial sales, comfortably use the word "customer" to both internal and external customers.
Obsolete meaning: In the early 17th century customer was defined as a "common prostitute. This meaning is important for understanding historical literary works. ("I marry her! What, a customer?") Othello, or ("I think thee now a common customer") All's Well that Ends Well. Today the meaning of "customer" has been inverted in this usage.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA