Sustainable Development as a Driver for Customer Experience

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Sustainable development as a driver for customer satisfaction 

Dear Authors,

Pls help to revise as below suggestions:

Abstract

• Not clear significance and contribution of this study

Introduction

• The authors can reconsider any hypotheses, aim and objectives of the study clearly and presentably.

Literature Review

• A comprehensive literature review developed

Methodology

• Improved

Results

• Improved

Discussion

• Improved

Conclusions

• Improved

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Following my previous comments about your work, I believe that you have answered to all the comments that I have pointed.

I think the document improved.

Good luck with your work.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors

The article presents very important issues, I suggest the only one to highlight the limitations and to describe future research directions more broadly.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Sustainable development as a driver for customer satisfaction 

Dear Authors,

Pls help to revise as below suggestions:

Abstract

The background, aim, objectives, scope of works of the study is not described clearly.

Which industry of the customer satisfaction applied for?

It is not clear about the industry of customer satisfaction.

Evidence is required to support by the literature.

The variables are not clearly presented and identified at the abstract.

The research method is missing and is not clearly presented.

In general, the abstract is confusing and presented illogically. The author is required to rewrite the abstract.

What is the significance and contribution of this study?

Introduction

The introduction is generally acceptable with the background and investigation of the whole study, but still some unclear and missing.

• “Despite these notions, there still seems to be an urgent need to make SD more understandable and workable for everyday business life [5,10,11], especially regarding customer perceptions.” This statement identifies the need of SD on the customer perceptions, but it is still unclear why and how the urgent need to make SD on the customer perceptions.
• “in relation to other classical measures of quality, such as customer satisfaction, brand image and loyalty” The authors are advised to identify and explore more literatures on the three classical measures of quality, such as customer satisfaction, brand image and loyalty in the paper.
• The authors are required to consider any hypotheses, aim and objectives on the study.

Literature Review

• The authors are advised to develop and write a new session of literature review about the recent literatures on the topic of customer satisfaction.
• An independent session of literature view is necessary to incorporate about such as the history of sustainable development on the customer satisfaction, the reason on the discussion of the importance of customer satisfaction, the relationship and development of the sustainable development on customer satisfaction. The present formats seem not have enough description and explanation on this background information.

Methodology

• Materials and Methods: The word “2. Materials” is not correct. Is this session only about research methods? Literature review? The authors are advised to clearly identify and find out the research methods and literature review independently.
• It is not clear about why the Customer model is a PLS Path Modelling (PLS-PM) model approach. The author is advised to check and explain in details of the reason on selection of PLS Path Modelling (PLS-PM) model approach in this study as Structural Equation Models. Such as the Pros and Cons
• The authors are advised to add a table to indicate the distribution of profile / details of respondents at the questionnaire survey. Now, it is not clear. After incorporated this new table, it is advised to further explain and describe the discovery and observations from the data.

Results

• Table 2. Summary statistics of latent variables in the Customer model. – There is no sufficient explanation and description of the table 2. It is necessary to discuss and describe the data from the table 2.
• Figure 2 displays a summarization over the results estimated in the Customer model - There is no sufficient explanation and description of the Figure 2. It is necessary to discuss and describe the data from the Figure 2.

Discussion

• It is reasonable to explain the existence of a variety of customer segments, within industrial and societal sectors in the discussion.
• It is reasonable to explain that environmental, climatic and societal factors are in the sustainable impacts.

Conclusions

• No clear recommendation
• No clear limitation

References

Sufficient number of literature review

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors.

Your paper has a very interesting theme.

Section 1. Introduction

Overall, it is ok.

Section 2. Materials and Methods

You should better explain the proposed model. In page 2 you mention: “ The three listed holistic manifest items (SDI- items 1:3) below are proposed to capture a latent construct of SD: …”. Yet, a better explanation to link the latent construct with the scale items is need.

Moreover, you must provide more information about the your methods. For instance, what was the used software to compute data.

Regarding to the validity and reliability, you mention that you used the “internal consistency as well as its relationship towards earlier researched TBL items.”

Regarding this issue, I think that you should assess this work (Hair et al. 2017) which provide guidelines how to assess the analysis using a PLS-SEM, and this one (Fornell and Larker 1981) regarding the convergent validity and, an alternative to the Cronbach’s alfa (Composite reliability). As well as these (Churchill 1979; Nunnaly and Bernstein 1994).

I believe that this section is somewhat confuse and should be improved.

Furthermore, I believe that you should mention here the underlying reasoning for the scale items choice and, if you are developing a model to “estimate the effect of customer perceptions, regarding SD”, using items from several previous scales, why not to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

Section 3. Results.

You must information about you assessed the scales validity.

Moreover, results must be better explained. You presented several tables, yet a better explanation of the obtained results must be provided.

Section 4 is missing. You passed from section 3 to section 5.

Section 5. Discussion.

Considering there the results section must be improved, providing detailed information about the results, you must also improve this section.

For instance, you mention at the end of the first paragraph in section 5. Discussion: “In this study such connections are evaluated from its effect on EPSI variables and thus mediating financial performance”. Departing from the provided results, how can you assess the mediating effect?

Section 6 should be improved; conclusions should be expanded and a better link to the study’s objective must be provided.

Overall assessment.

You paper has several issues that must be improved. The literature review is missing. The Materials and Methods section has several aspects that must be improved.

The results section is not clearly explained, and I believe that you must provide additional data (take a look to the references I send below).

Section 4 is missing, and section 5 and 6 must be improved after the need changes in methods and results.

Good luck with your work.

References

Churchill, Gilbert A. Jr. 1979. “A Paradigm for Developing Better Measures of Marketing Constructs.” Journal of Marketing Research 16 (1): 64. https://doi.org/10.2307/3150876.

Fornell, Claes, and David F. Larker. 1981. “Evaluating Structural Equation Models with Unobservable Variables and Measurement Error.” Journal of Marketing Research 18 (1): 39–50. https://doi.org/10.2307/3151312.

Hair, Joseph F. Jr., G.Tomas M. Hult, Christian M. Ringle, and Marko Sarstedt. 2017. A Primer On Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Second Edi. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Nunnaly, Jum C, and Ira H Bernstein. 1994. Psychometric Theory. 3rd Ed. New York: McGrawHill.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors

I have some comments presented below:

Abstract. The methodology and research sample should be described in more detail.

Introduction. In the case of sustainable development, the economic, environmental, and social perspectives should be more widely described, as well as the variables used in the customer model.

Materials and methods. The description of the methodology and sample selection should be expanded. It is known that computer-assisted web interviews were conducted with customers from the banking, telecom, insurance, and Energy. It is also known that the final data consist of 667 individual observations. It needs to be clarified how many in the first stage were from these sectors before applying the exclusion criteria. The items included in the customer model should also be described in the methodology.

Discussion. The results should be described in a broader sustainability context and why there were differences between sectors.

Conclusions. The limitations of this research should be described.