Using customer-focused research and design to build a self-service online store: a case study
American government information centers need to be responsive to an increasingly customer driven information environment while ensuring the sustainability of operations. Enhanced self-service options offer one avenue for addressing both of these needs. This article presents a case study of how the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration used extensive stakeholder research and a customer-centric design to reframe its service model by building a self-service online store that integrates access to more than 1300 behavioral health publications previously housed in two separate clearinghouses. The redesigned Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration Store offers users a modern e-commerce website that not only helps customers find, order, download, and share products, but also encourages serendipitous content exploration, which has led to increased orders containing both substance abuse and mental health publications.
The question as to whether the globalisation-related increase in competitive pressure may have caused the importance of exchange rate pass-through and pricing-to-market for export pricing in Germany to shift since the 1990s is addressed by testing the long-run export pricing behaviour of German enterprises for changes in the impact of its determinants. As globalisation may have affected competitive pressure in individual product markets differently, export pricing is analysed for 11 product categories. Analytically, this problem is solved by applying the Saikkonen (1991) approach to estimate the individual export price categories in single equations. Moreover, error correction models are used to test exporters' short-run price-setting behaviour for asymmetry, ie whether short-run increases in the export price determinants are passed through to a different extent than decreases.