Logistics Performance,Customer Satisfaction,and Share of Business: A Comparison of Primary and Secondary Suppliers

The linkage between logistics performance and overall firm performance has received attention in the literature for more than 30 years. However, researchers have not investigated if differences in performance between primary and secondary suppliers affect customer satisfaction and the percentage of business allocated to suppliers. In this research, primary suppliers received more than four times as much business as the secondary suppliers. We investigated the impact of the Marketing Mix on customer satisfaction and share of business for primary suppliers and secondary suppliers, and identified differences between the two groups, using multigroup structural equation modeling. The results indicate that perceived performance on logistics attributes significantly affects customer satisfaction and the percentage of business that is allocated to primary and secondary suppliers, which is key information for developing competitive strategies. Our research findings challenge the practice of providing service levels to customers based on current revenue or profitability which does little to convince customers, who are using a company as secondary source, to make it the primary supplier.     

The impact of new technologies on customer satisfaction and business to business customer relationships: Evidence from the soft drinks industry

Sales technology has been touted as a primary tool for enhancing customer relationship management (CRM) and thus improving overall customer satisfaction. The marketing, IT, and practitioner literatures make numerous references to the impact of CRM on business orientation and performance. However, according to Richard et al. (2007), not many studies have investigated customer relationship technology adopted by a firm and the impact on relationship development. The aim of this paper is to examine the relative impact of new technologies on improving customer relations and overall customer satisfaction within the sales industry. New technologies have revolutionised the workplace and have become an integral part of organisations throughout the world (Forster, 2000). Driving this revolution are two powerful new forces, cyberspace and computing power. This article defines three key terms which include CRM, customer satisfaction and new technologies and evaluates the impact of these emerging technological developments on relationships and customer satisfaction in a sales force/customer context. Primary research was conducted using two focus groups consisting of nine participants from Britvic. The analysis reveals that technology is both beneficial and essential within the sales force industry for both the sales representative and their customers and provides an insight into the impact of technology on the sales force/customer relationship. The paper concludes with reference to new technologies and the future.     

LOGISTICS SERVICE PERFORMANCE: ESTIMATING ITS INFLUENCE ON MARKET SHARE

The research examines the relationships among three dimensions of logistics service performance (operational, relational, and cost performance), customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and market share. Perceptions of customers of third party logistics (3PL) providers are used to assess 3PL performance constructs. Of the three dimensions of service performance, relational performance is the single most important factor in engendering customer satisfaction. The research supports the strong relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty identified in previous studies. It also establishes an empirical link between customer loyalty and a measure of market share that is anchored by objective, secondary data.     

Evaluating and Managing Brand Repurchase Across Multiple Geographic Retail Markets

Many companies manage their business on a geographic basis and evaluate marketing metrics and managers correspondingly. Here, using a multi-level dataset from the U.S. retail gasoline industry, we demonstrate inherent differences in the levels of brand repurchase across territories. Furthermore, we show that the effects of factors that may improve repurchase—customer satisfaction and customers’ relational investments—are moderated by market share at the territorial level. Relational investments have relatively more effect on repurchase in territories where a brand's market share is higher, while customer satisfaction has relatively more effect in territories where a brand's market share is lower. These findings imply that one size does not fit all for either evaluating or managing brand performance at a territorial level.     

Employee encouragement of self-disclosure in the service encounter and its impact on customer satisfaction

In the service encounter, the employee must often encourage customer self-disclosure (i.e., revealing of personal information) to be able to match the customer's needs with what the firm has to offer. This study uses an experimental approach to manipulate employee encouragement of self-disclosure (low vs. high) to explore its impact on the customer. It was found that encouraging self-disclosure enhanced customer perceptions of customization, employee effort, own effort, privacy concerns, and employee humanness, and that these responses influenced customer satisfaction. In addition, because many firms are beginning to replace human employees with various forms of virtual agents (and it has been argued that we humans may find it less threatening to self-disclose to such agents), the identity of the employee (virtual agent vs. human employee) was manipulated, too. The identity factor, however, did not influence customers' responses.     

Friend or foe: Customer-supplier relationships and innovation

This study provides an empirical investigation of the impact of customer-supplier relationships on firm innovation in an interorganizational framework encompassing transaction cost economics, resource dependence theory, and the theory of incomplete contracts. Using a sample of U.S. firms for the period from 1980 to 2005, this study explores how customer concentration and customer bargaining power affect a supplier's process innovation and product innovation measured with R&D-to-assets ratio and patents (also citations), respectively. The findings imply that a concentrated customer base, which reflects a strong customer-supplier relationship as well as high switching costs, motivates suppliers to invest more in R&D and become more innovative. However, the evidence also suggests that strong customer bargaining power creates hold-up problems and forces suppliers to invest less in R&D and innovation. The results are robust to sophisticated econometric techniques that control for endogeneity and suggest heterogeneous effects of business partnerships on firm innovation.     

It pays to pay attention: How firm's and competitor's marketing levers affect investor attention and firm value

Investors' attention to a firm's stock has been demonstrated to influence stock returns (Da et al., 2011). But does a firm's marketing information draw attention to a firm's stock? Research in finance, accounting, and marketing has investigated advertising as one potential driver of investors' attention to a firm's stock. How about other potential marketing drivers? The authors develop hypotheses related to the impact of the changes in four marketing levers: advertising, product development announcements, WOM, and customer satisfaction on the change in investor attention to a firm's stock. Furthermore, they investigate the moderating role of competitors' marketing levers in these relationships.To test the hypotheses, they compile a panel dataset with 349 firms covering the 2007–2017 period. The results suggest that the changes in the focal firm's advertising and WOM have a positive and significant impact on the changes in investor attention to the focal firm’s stock. Furthermore, these effects are amplified when there is an increase in competitors' advertising spending and WOM, respectively. For the customer satisfaction lever, the results suggest that the change in competitors' customer satisfaction enhances the impact of the change in focal firm's customer satisfaction on investor attention. Collectively, the results suggest that investors attend to the firm's and its competitors' marketing information in a much more nuanced manner than previously thought.     

Service Orientation: Its Impact on Business Performance in the Medical Service Industry

From the viewpoint of internal marketing, employees who are content in their job may be motivated to satisfy their customers better than ones who are not content. Another relevant premise is that the content employees, because of their work motivation, would eventually help improve the performance of their firm. To verify these relationships, some previous studies looked into the effects of organisational service orientation on employee's satisfaction. But only few of them investigated the mediating effects of variables such as service value and customer orientation for their role in linking service orientation to business performance. This study examines how an organisation's service orientation had an effect on its performance at hospitals. For this purpose, verification of the mediating role of service value perceived by employees as well as the role of customer orientation on the firm's performance was attempted. For this study, a total of 292 usable questionnaires were collected from hospital staffs located in metropolitan cities of Korea. The hypotheses concerning relationships among service orientation, service value, employee satisfaction and customer orientation were verified by covariance structural modelling, using SPSS 10.0 and AMOS 4.0 programs. The result is as follows. First, organisational service orientation had a positive effect on both employee satisfaction and service value perceived by hospital staff. Second, employee satisfaction had a positive impact on service value and customer orientation. Finally, service value as well as employee's customer orientation were found to exert positive influence on the medical firm's performance.     

RETAIL ON‐SHELF PERFORMANCE OF ADVERTISED ITEMS: AN ASSESSMENT OF SUPPLY CHAIN EFFECTIVENESS AT THE POINT OF PURCHASE

In the retail environment, one key prerequisite to satisfying customers is to have the product available, on the shelf, when and where the customer expects to find it. The study reported here evaluated the on‐shelf stock performance of three distinct types of retailers–mass merchandisers, category killers, and grocery retailers. Overall on‐shelf performance for advertised items was just 83.5% percent. Follow‐up interviews with store managers indicate that availability problems are often the result of merchandising or store operations issues and not necessarily logistics or warehousing problems. However, in today's supply chain world, the real measure of success is satisfaction all the way to the customer's trunk.     

The Effects of Relationship Marketing on Share of Business: A Synthesis and Comparison of Models

ABSTRACT

Purpose: The article synthesizes the extensive empirical work on relationship marketing (RM) and compares the various conceptualizations to give a better understanding of the relational factors (i.e., characteristics of the business relationship) that improve a seller’s objective performance (i.e., share of business) in a business-to-business (B2B) services context. These conceptualizations, taken from the literature, link relational antecedents (i.e., communication, domain expertise, relational value, and mutual goals) to relational mediators (i.e., trust, satisfaction, commitment, relationship quality) to explore how they in turn affect a seller’s share of business.

Methodology/approach: All 4 models derived from the literature review were assessed using a dataset drawn from a survey of 948 client firm representatives of a Portuguese hotel chain in a B2B services context.

Findings: The best of the models in terms of model fit and prediction of share of business shows that only customer commitment directly drives a seller’s share of business, and simultaneous interrelated changes in customer trust and satisfaction, as well as customer perceptions of relational value, drive customer commitment, and so exert indirect effects on performance. The model that proposes that a seller’s performance is strengthened by simultaneous interrelated improvements in customer trust, satisfaction, and commitment (i.e., with these three mediators being conceptualized as a single, combined, higher-order mediator, termed relationship quality [RQ]) shows inferior fit. No combination of mediators (satisfaction, trust, or commitment) improves the seller’s objective performance over and above their individual effects (i.e., there are no synergistic effects).

Research implications: The literature review suggested four ways of modeling RM antecedents, mediators, and their effect on performance. Complex second-order constructs such as RQ lack explanatory power when predicting outcomes and mask the effects of individual relational mediators. Correct conceptualization is important, as conclusions vary drastically even with the same set of relational mediators and same dataset.

Practical implications: B2B service providers’ investments in RM will lead to improved share of business only if customer commitment is high or there is at least the potential to improve it. This requires an understanding of how valuable

the customer believes the relationship to be, and how the customer rates the relationship with the firm in terms of satisfaction and trust. A customer segmentation approach to relationship building and maintenance is advocated and detailed suggestions are put forward.

Originality/value/contribution: Apart from the work by Palmatier, the relationships between RM antecedents and mediators have not yet been examined simultaneously and findings are fragmented. The article provides a synthesis of this expansive literature. It contrasts different interplays between RM mediators, including their interrelationships as a higher-order construct, and explores possible synergy effects. Unlike previous work, this study focused on an objective measure of seller performance (i.e., share of business), whereas previous studies have tended to examine subjective measures, especially within the B2B context. Furthermore, four full models were assessed here, each of which included the antecedents to RM mediators and their links to objective performance.     

The Advisor-SMF Client Relationship: Impact,Satisfaction and Commitment

This paper investigates the relationship between the type of business advisors used by SMEs and the level of impact and satisfaction a SME receives. The role of other influences, such as the intensity and cost of the service, and the level of commitment to an advisor by the client are also investigated. A structural equation path model is estimated from survey information for SMEs in Britain. The analysis shows that customer impact, satisfaction and re-use intentions are related to the character of the firm (particularly its size), the intensity and cost of services, but is only marginally influenced by the geographical distance between advisor and client. Affective commitment, measured by the level of the ‘trust’ of the advisor by the client, is shown not to be significant, except for public sector and business association suppliers. The importance of trust to these suppliers, despite the low satisfaction levels they achieve, is argued to be incompatible with attempts to charge fees, as has been sought for the government network of Business Link. Both business associations and public sector support bodies therefore have severe limitations in combining their broader roles with a commercially- based fee-based income strategy.     

Acceptance of recommendations to buy in online retailing

Nowadays, many online shops try to improve their customer service by personalization. Personal welcomings, individual assistance as well as recommendations to inform and buy are getting an integral part of the customer communication. These new elements are assumed to increase the retailer's share of wallet and – ideally at the same time – the customer's satisfaction with the online shop. However, till date only few studies have analyzed which external factors influence the customer's acceptance of such assistance. This paper closes this gap by an experiment, where a modified Technology Acceptance Model is used for measuring the customer's acceptance. Volunteers are offered an online shopping experience with individually generated recommendations to buy. The results show a high acceptance of the generated recommendations and how close this acceptance is connected to the quality and shopping relevance of the recommendations. Even though the results are limited to the specific recommendation types used, they give important implications for an adequate design of modern online shops.     

Cooperation versus competition: do buyers and suppliers really see eye-to-eye?

Purchasers have used a variety of tools to help improve the performance of their suppliers’ processes and products. Results of two large-scale surveys that compare buyer and supplier perceptions of a common customer firm's supplier development and its supply base's adoption of total quality management are reported here. One customer, known for its cooperative (partnership-like) approach to supplier relations, is contrasted with another firm that uses supplier switching to meet its procurement needs. Analysis of the survey data indicates that buyers and suppliers have a better “shared understanding” (smaller satisfaction gap) within the “competitive” relationship than within the “cooperative” relationship.     

The influence of customer-to-customer interactions and role typology on customer reaction

The service encounter is an important topic in service management. Although researchers have argued that customer-to-customer interactions may affect customers' evaluation of the service experience in service encounter contexts, the impact of customer-to-customer interaction on customer reaction has not been sufficiently studied. Consequently, the objective of this research is to investigate the relationship between customer-to-customer interactions, role typology and customer reaction. This research adopted questionnaires to investigate tourists traveling to foreign areas and concluded that the perception of customer-to-customer interaction incidents could be extracted into six factors. ‘Protocol and sociability incidents’ have a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction; ‘malcontent incidents’ have a negative impact; ‘crude incidents’ and ‘malcontent incidents’ have significant negative impact on customer loyalty; and finally, the customer's role typology moderates the relationship between ‘protocol and sociability incidents’ and customer satisfaction.     

Merely asking the customer to recommend has an impact on word-of-mouth activity

This paper examines if a mere request to a customer – within the frame of a service encounter – to engage in word-of-mouth (WOM) would have an impact on the customer's subsequent WOM activity. Although previous studies have not examined this issue, theoretical arguments do exist. And they point in different directions; some suggest a positive impact, while others suggest a negative impact. To explore the issue empirically, we carried out two studies (one survey-based study and one experiment). Both generated the same result: they indicate that merely asking customers to engage in WOM has a positive impact on customers' WOM activity. In addition, we found that receiving the request was not negatively associated with the customers' overall evaluations, such as customer satisfaction, which indicates that the potential for negative consequences of making the request seems to be low.     

Innovation patterns and their effects on firm performance

This study aims to identify various innovation patterns and understand their effects on firm performance across business service sectors. By collecting empirical data from 198 Korean business services firms, we explore these firms’ major innovation patterns, conceptualized as combinations of different service innovation dimensions: service concept, service delivery, customer interaction, and technology. Then, in accordance with the innovation patterns they display, we group these firms into four clusters: ‘service delivery-based high-technology', ‘service delivery and customer interaction-integrated', ‘customer interaction-based high-technology', and ‘strongly balanced’ innovators. Last, we investigate whether these patterns influence firm performance. Our findings are three-fold: (1) the innovation patterns in business service firms result from the creation of new combinations of major service innovation dimensions, (2) four independent innovation patterns emerge in business service firms, and (3) these patterns lead to different levels of firm performance. Practically, our findings highlight the importance of highly qualified employees, customer interaction, and technology in improving financial performance.     

Why Do Firms in Customer–Supplier Relationships Hold More Cash?

A firm is in customer–supplier relationships when its business depends on a small number of major customers/suppliers. In this paper, we provide evidence that relationship‐specific investments undertaken by firms in customer–supplier relationships are associated with high cash holdings in these firms. The evidence is consistent with the prediction of Titman's stakeholder theory that a firm relying on relationship‐specific investments maintains a high cash reserve as a cushion to sustain its relationship‐specific investments when negative shocks occur. Our findings suggest that relationship‐specific investments are important determinants of the precautionary motive to hold cash.     

Understanding online product ratings: A customer satisfaction model

Online product ratings have become a major information source for customers, retailers, and manufacturers. Both practitioners and researchers predominantly interpret them as a reflection of product quality. We argue that they in fact represent the customer's satisfaction with the product. Accordingly, we present a customer satisfaction model of online product ratings which incorporates the customer's pre-purchase expectations and actual product performance as determinants of ratings. We validate our model by applying it to two datasets collected at the German website of Amazon.com. The results indicate that both factors have a significant influence on online product ratings, supporting the proposed interpretation of ratings.     

Value and Satisfaction Evaluations During a Service Relationship

Abstract

The research used a sample of credit union customers to determine (a) the relative importance of core and peripheral service attributes on customer evaluations of service value and customer satisfaction, and (b) how the relative importance of these criteria change over the life of the service relationship. For the overall sample, peripheral service attributes accounted for over three-fourths of the variance for service value and customer satisfaction. Dividing the sample into three sub-samples based on age of the customer's relationship with the credit union, peripheral service attributes drove evaluations of service value and customer satisfaction for the first stage of the relationship (ten years or less) and the middle stage of the relationship (eleven to nineteen years). Once the relationship aged to twenty or more years, core attributes drove evaluations of service value and customer satisfaction. Findings indicate that relationship strategies for the credit union may need to be customized based on the amount of time customers have had a relationship with a service firm.     

Assessing Customer Satisfaction in a V-commerce Environment

This article describes the design and implementation of a non-intrusive method of assessing customer satisfaction in a voice-enabled electronic commerce environment. After recording a customer's speech voice during his or her interaction with a voice-enabled Web system (VWS), a subsequent questionnaire survey was immediately administered to identify the satisfaction level of the customer. Afterward, a collection of recorded customer voice files and the corresponding values of customer satisfaction were used to construct an artificial neural network-based expert system, the satisfaction level assessment system (SLAS), which was thereafter integrated into VWS for automatically detecting the satisfaction level of VWS users. Experiments were performed to test the feasibility and applicability of the proposed method, and good preliminary results were derived. Instead of using the conventional questionnaire-based approach, SLAS is non-intrusive because it does not require users to fill out any questionnaire. The proposed method can be used by various voice-based business applications, such as call centers and customer relationship management, to achieve the business objective of improving customer satisfaction, enforcing customer loyalty, increasing re-purchase rate, and enhancing enterprise's benefits. The proposed SLAS (including method and system) that was filed for patent application was recently approved by the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office under Patent No. I268478.