SALES FORECASTING PROBLEMS

1. The table below shows the sales for a new TV at Radio Shack for each of the last 7
months.

Month 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Sales 23 29 33 40 41 43 49

Calculate a two month moving average for months two to seven. What would be your
forecast for the sales in month eight?

Apply exponential smoothing with a smoothing constant of 0.1 to derive a forecast for
the sales in month eight.

Which of the two forecasts for month eight do you prefer and why?

2. The following data reports sales of a new razor for each of the last nine months.

Month 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Sales 10 12 13 17 15 19 20 21 20

Calculate a three month moving average for months three to nine. What would be your
forecast for the sales in month ten?

Apply exponential smoothing with a smoothing constant of 0.3 to derive a forecast for
the sales in month ten.

Which of the two forecasts for month ten do you prefer and why?

INSTRUCTION:
You have to do these two problems after the discussion of a similar problem in the class.
It will be due the class after the discussion.
 CUSTOMER SATISFACTION DEFINITION AND MEASUREMENT

INSTRUCTION

Read the following articles and answer the following questions:

How would you define customer satisfaction?

What factors influence customer satisfaction?

Write a short half-page summary answering these two questions. Submit the same on the
day of the discussion of this topic.

Exploring Customer Repeat Patronage in Tourism: The

Influence of Marketing Culture, Relational Selling, and Sales
Expertise
Cheng-Yuan Hsu, Chou-Kang Chiu. Journal of American Academy of Business,
Cambridge. Hollywood: Mar 2007.Vol.10, Iss. 2; pg. 80, 4 pgs

Service Personnel, Technology, and Their Interaction in

Influencing Customer Satisfaction*
Craig M Froehle. Decision Sciences. Atlanta: Feb 2006.Vol.37, Iss. 1; pg. 5, 34 pgs

Outcome Measure: Customer Satisfaction

The outcome (endogenous) variable of the model is customer satisfaction. More specifically, this
variable reflects the customer's impression of the service experience relative to expectations (see
Appendix A for a complete description). The midpoint of the scale represents "met expectations," with
higher scores equating to exceeding expectations and lower scores signifying that the experience did
not live up to expectations.

This "experience versus expectation" approach to measuring customer satisfaction is similar to

previous models of service quality, such as the "gap" model foundation of SERVQUAL (Parasuraman
et al., 1985; Zeithaml, Parasuraman, & Berry, 1990). The item format used here, which combines in a
single item the comparison of perception and expectation, has often been suggested in the literature
(e.g., Cronin & Taylor, 1994; Van Dyke et al., 1999; Kettinger & Lee, 2005) due to better validity and/or
predictive qualities.
The effects of satisfaction, opportunism, and asset specificity
on consumers' loyalty intention toward internet portal sites
Jyh-Shen Chiou, Chung-Chi Shen. International Journal of Service Industry
Management. Bradford: 2006.Vol.17, Iss. 1; pg. 7, 16 pgs

Overall satisfaction is modeled a mediator between attributive service satisfaction and loyalty intention,
and between perceived opportunism and loyalty intention. The fundamental framework is based on
Lazarus' (1991) theory of emotion and adaptation. Lazarus proposed that appraisal processes of
internal and situational conditions lead to emotional responses; these, in turn, induce coping activities-
appraisal -> emotional response - coping framework (Bagozzi, 1992). Attributive service satisfaction
is modeled as the appraisal processes because it is the process that a person seeks to evaluate
whether the outcome is consistent with his/her desire. When one experiences a pleasant event, an
outcome-desire fulfillment is occurred. This experience will lead to satisfaction, pleasure, joy etc.
Therefore, overall satisfaction is modeled as the emotional response. Finally, if the experience is
satisfactory, specific intention will emerge to take steps to maintain or increase the satisfaction state
(coping activities). In other words, one may have higher intention to remain loyal to the specific service
provider to maintain or increase his/her satisfaction state. Therefore, loyalty intention is modeled as the
coping activities in the framework.

Overall satisfaction was assessed by three item measures taken from measures of satisfaction
developed by Oliver (1980a, b).
A Service Perspective on the Drivers of Complaint Intentions
Clay M Voorhees, Michael K Brady. Journal of Service Research : JSR. Thousand Oaks: Nov
2005.Vol.8, Iss. 2; pg. 192, 13 pgs

Customer satisfaction is a judgment that the product or service provides a pleasing level of
consumption fulfillment (Oliver 1981, 1997). Three encounter-specific items from Oliver's ( 1997)
satisfaction scale were adopted and proved to be internally consistent with a construct reliability
estimate of .92.