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Over the last years, the concept of customer delight has moved into the focus of attention. The necessity of surprise for achieving customer delight and the problem of increased customer expectation (spiral of expectations) have been controversially discussed in the literature. The purpose of the paper is therefore to investigate whether customer delight necessarily requires surprise and whether a misdirected delight strategy can backfire by creating disloyal customers.

This study employs a 2 (after-sales extra value: yes vs no)×2 (knowledge about the extra value: yes vs no) between-subject, scenario-based experiment (n=472) in a hotel environment and partial least squares structural equation modeling to analyze the data.

Study results show that surprise is not a necessary prerequisite for achieving customer delight, but its presence strengthens the delight experience for the customer, positively impacting customer loyalty intentions. Conversely, a surprising nonoccurrence of an expected delight measure causes anger, inducing negative word of mouth and reduced repurchase intentions.

To pursue a sustainable customer delight approach, companies should recognize that they do not need to surprise their customers on every occasion, but rather ensure that customers do not fall short of anticipated delightful events.

The current research strives to contribute to the theory and practice by shedding light on two so far not appropriately addressed research areas of customer delight: the necessity of surprise to evoke customer delight and the consequences of absent but expected delight measures.

Deciding on the appropriate level of service is one of the paramount decisions a firm must make. Making this decision more complicated is the debate regarding the viability of aiming for the highest level of service or customer delight. One avenue of research missing from the literature is the impact of providing delight to one customer while in the presence of others. In response the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the emotional and cognitive reactions of the observing customer.

Structural equation modeling was utilized to evaluate a sample of 272 respondents. Additional moderation analysis was conducted on the impact of perceived deservingness.

Findings indicate that the observing customer experiences the dual effects of joy and jealousy which both impact perceptions of unfairness and subsequent behaviors of complaining and repurchase. The perceived deservingness of the customer experiencing the delight is shown to reduce the impact of jealousy on unfairness.

The main limitations include cross-sectional data and the fact that the data were retrospective.

This research suggests that firms should embrace the positive contagion that occurs between the delighted customer and observer while attempting to minimize the impact of jealousy.

This is the first research to quantitatively evaluate the impact of a customer viewing another customer receiving delight.

Linking Open Data (LOD) provides a vast amount of well structured semantic information, but many inconsistencies may occur, especially if the data are generated with the help of automated methods. Data cleansing approaches enable detection of inconsistencies and overhauling of affected data sets, but they are difficult to apply automatically. The purpose of this paper is to present WhoKnows?, an online quiz that generates different kinds of questionnaires from DBpedia data sets.

Besides its playfulness, WhoKnows? has been developed for the evaluation of property relevance ranking heuristics on DBpedia data, with the convenient side effect of detecting inconsistencies and doubtful facts.

The original purpose for developing WhoKnows? was to evaluate heuristics to rank LOD properties and thus, obtain a semantic relatedness between entities according to the properties by which they are linked. The presented approach is an efficient method to detect popular properties within a limited amount of triples. Ongoing work continues in the development of sound property ranking heuristics for the purpose of detecting the most relevant characteristics of entities.

WhoKnows? uses the approach of “Games with a Purpose” to detect inconsistencies in Linked Data and score properties to rank them for sophisticated semantic search scenarios.

Cooperative knowledge spaces create new potentials for the experimental fields in natural sciences and engineering because they enhance the accessibility of experimental setups through virtual laboratories and remote technology, opening them for collaborative and distributed usage. A concept for extending existing virtual knowledge spaces for the means of the technological disciplines (“ViCToR‐Spaces” ‐ Virtual Cooperation in Teaching and Research for Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Engineering) is presented. The integration of networked virtual laboratories and remote experiments (“NanoLab Approach”), as well as an approach to community‐driven content sharing and content development within virtual knowledge spaces (NanoWiki) are described.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the usability (effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction) of e‐feedback interfaces. The experiment compares a traditional visual approach with a multimodal approach in order to determine the impact of multimodal metaphors upon the user's understanding, reasoning and engagement with the e‐feedback.

The empirical investigation involved visual (text with graphical illustrations) and multimodal (audio‐visual with expressive avatars and recorded speech) experimental e‐feedback platforms. Both experimental platforms provided the same e‐feedback but used different interaction metaphors to convey the information. The evaluation approach measured effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction.

The results showed that the multimodal approach increased usability in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and engagement of users with the e‐feedback. There is a very clear prima facie case that combining different communication metaphors to convey information involved in the e‐feedback simultaneously does not increase the information overload on users. This however was observed to be the case when the visual channel was used.

This paper introduces a unique approach that uses specific combinations of multimodal metaphors to communicate information about e‐feedback simultaneously. This approach increased the usability of e‐feedback and user's engagement in interfaces for e‐learning applications.

The content, provided in learning management systems (LMS), is often text oriented as in a usual textbook, extended by some animations and links. Hands on activities and experiments are not possible. The paper aims to give an overview about the concept to couple smart simulation and assessment tools with an LMS to provide a more explorative approach to the learning content.

Interactive components, such as smart design tools and online laboratories are added to an LMS that allow exploring the learned content additionally to text parts interactively. The objective of this teaching concept is to empower the students to solve complex design tasks for digital systems and to validate the results. This requires on the one hand site knowledge about the mathematical background of the algorithms used by design tools, and on the other hand, experience from as much as possible examples. Commercial tools are too complex for teaching purposes and hide mostly the algorithms they use for the several design steps. That is why we have developed smart special tailored tools for each single design step that should be learned during a lesson.

These smart tools are very useful to support the process of understanding and learning by doing. Learners can explore the several design steps with own examples and get immediately feedback about the correct solutions.

The connection to an LMS allows us to record all students' relevant actions in the design process and to evaluate the student or to give individual tailored hints.

The paper introduces a new teaching concept that allows exploring the learned content interactively additionally to text parts.

At many universities, web lectures have become an integral part of the e‐learning portfolio over the last few years. While many aspects of the technology involved, like automatic recording techniques or innovative interfaces for replay, have evolved at a rapid pace, web lecturing has remained independent of other important developments such as Web 2.0. The aim of this paper is to exemplify and discuss the benefits web lecturing can gain from a Web 2.0 perspective.

The paper describes an implementation of three Web 2.0 features for the virtPresenter web lecture interface. These are time‐based social footprints, a mechanism for linking to user created bookmarks in a web lecture from external Web 2.0 applications and a special web lecture player that enables users to embed their own web lecture bookmarks in wikis or blogs.

The paper shows how conceptual and technical obstacles in bringing Web 2.0 features like social footprints to web lectures can be overcome. It also makes evident that linking web lectures in Web 2.0 systems require special adaptations due to the time‐based nature of web lectures. The technical discussion shows that many Web 2.0 features require feedback channels in order to communicate information back to servers (e.g. to understand how the content is used) and that most contemporary media players have to be modified in order to support feedback channels.

The paper shows that web lectures can benefit from Web 2.0 ideas and presents examples how Web 2.0 and web lectures can be brought together.

Web 2.0 is a popular trend that transforms the way in which the internet is used. This paper shows how web lectures can be enriched with Web 2.0 features and how they can be integrated with Web 2.0 systems by discussing three implementation examples.