Customer loyalty in e-commerce: an exploration of its antecedents and consequences

This paper investigates the antecedents and consequences of customer loyalty in an online business-to-consumer (B2C) context. We identify eight factors (the 8Cs—customization, contact interactivity, care, community, convenience, cultivation, choice, and character) that potentially impact e-loyalty and develop scales to measure these factors. Data collected from 1,211 online customers demonstrate that all these factors, except convenience, impact e-loyalty. The data also reveal that e-loyalty has an impact on two customer-related outcomes: word-of- mouth promotion and willingness to pay more.     

Development of a service continance model with IT service antecedents

This study make provides service marketers, particularly those delivering information technology (IT) related service, with insight to the factors that consumers use when evaluating IT services. We develop a service continuance model that includes the antecedents of the consumer׳s decision to continue using information technology (IT) related services in a B2C service environment. Using data from the smart phone service consumers, a covariance-based structural equation modeling analysis is used to test the research model. Results from our empirical study suggest that the association between service usefulness and service continuation intention is fully mediated by service satisfaction. Though both system-service quality and customer-service quality are positively associated with service satisfaction, consumers of IT related services attach greater importance to system-service quality than to custom service quality. Likewise, the indirect path to service continuation intention is stronger in system-service quality than in customer-service quality. Our findings have practical implication for growing market share in IT related services by recognizing the importance of system-service quality in technology service delivery.     

Managing service recovery experience: Effects of the forgiveness for older consumers

The research studies empirically the role that fairness plays in shaping emotional and behavioral forgiveness among older U.S. consumers (55 years of age and older). A theoretical model is proposed and tested that proposes, consistent with theory on emotions, that perceptions of justice affect behavioral forgiveness through emotional forgiveness. An alternative theory questions whether the effects of justice are totally mediated by emotion. Comparative results support the latter model. The cognitive perceptions of justice display a stronger effect compared to the mediated effect through emotional forgiveness. Additionally, an examination of moderation by psychological age suggests that relatively old and young (psychologically) consumers react in the same manner. While clearly, service managers need to be sensitive to the emotions of senior customers, the results here suggest a stronger role for cognitive perceptions of justice. Thus, service providers need to provide senior consumers with clearly understandable explanations for any service failure and explain how the recovery efforts will compensate for the failure.     

The role of personality characteristics and service failure severity in consumer forgiveness and service outcomes

Abstract

This study investigates how consumer personality characteristics of religiosity, spirituality, and emotional intelligence and the severity of service failure affect emotional and decisional forgiveness as a response to service failure. Further, the study explores the relationships between these two forms of forgiveness and service outcomes, including the intention to switch the service provider and spread negative word of mouth. Findings reveal that consumer religiosity has a strong and positive effect on both types of forgiveness. However, contrary to expectations, consumer spirituality has a negative relationship with decisional and no relationship with emotional forgiveness. While consumers' perceived severity of service failure is negatively related to both types of forgiveness, the findings also suggest that emotional intelligence exerts a significant moderating influence on the relationship between service failure severity and emotional forgiveness, whereas its moderating effect on decisional forgiveness does not appear to be significant. Results demonstrate the asymmetric effects of perceived severity of service failure and the two types of forgiveness on negative service outcomes. These findings contribute to the understanding on the role of consumers' implicit personality characteristics in interpretation of service failure incidents.     

Self-diminishing effects of awe on consumer forgiveness in service encounters

Previous studies address consumers' emotions as an endogenous consequence of the service experience and assume that consumers base their decisions to forgive on the service situation's features; however, they rarely mention the role of the emotions that people might be experiencing, for reasons unrelated to the service failure itself. The current study thus considers a foundational but rarely examined human experience in business settings, awe, as well as its prosocial effect in service encounters. Incidental awe might alleviate the negative impacts of a service failure and enhance consumer forgiveness, through self-diminishment processes. Using four scenario-based experiments, referring to four types of service failures (outcome, process, controllable, and uncontrollable failures), this study tests for the positive effect of awe on consumers' inclination to forgive service failures and the mediating role of the small self in this effect. The present research thus enriches understanding of consumer forgiveness due to incidental emotions, which offers marketers some insights into how they might leverage methods that affect consumers' incidental emotions to encourage consumer forgiveness in service failures.     

Customer participation in service recovery: a meta-analysis

Research on customer participation in service recovery is surging, yet empirical examinations provide mixed results. A meta-analysis of 30 independent samples reported in 21 studies (N?=?7872) shows that the effect sizes for the relationships between customer participation in service recovery and customer outcomes are rather weak. We also find that customer participation in service recovery has an indirect effect on satisfaction with service recovery via distributive justice and procedural justice, but not via interactional justice. Conversely, customer participation in service recovery has an indirect effect on overall satisfaction via distributive justice and interactional justice, but not via procedural justice. Finally, the effectiveness of customer participation in service recovery is stronger when customers participate in the outcome of the recovery and for customers with an Eastern cultural background, but weaker when additional compensation is offered and in online settings.     

Customer satisfaction with service recovery

This commentary is about the article, “Satisfaction with Service Recovery: Perceived Justice and Emotional Responses” (Rio-Lanza, Vázquez-Casielles, and Diaz-Martin, this issue). Never before have so many services been bought, sold, and consumed as they are today. Competition today is fierce. More and more services include a technology component that may limit customer/employee contacts and make services more complex. Retaining customers, therefore, becomes a very relevant issue that makes Rio-Lanza et al.'s research important. Researchers in service management have studied service recovery considerably. This article describes some of the general trends in research about customer satisfaction in connection to service recovery as well as Rio-Lanza et al.'s contribution.     

Customer control and evaluation of service validity and reliability

A control and attribution model of service production and evaluation is proposed. Service production consists of the stages specification (input), realization (throughput), and outcome (output). Customers may exercise control over all three stages of the service. Critical factors of service production are service validity (is the correct service produced?) and reliability (is the service correctly produced?). With more control, customers feel more responsibility for and satisfaction with the service outcome. If this is the case, there is less attribution of service outcomes to the service provider and more to the customer, as a party in the service production. Self-perceptions and perceptual and attributional biases play a self-serving role to justify customer service engagement. Attributions of service outcomes determine perceptions of service quality and behavioral responses such as (dis)satisfaction, complaints, repeat buying, and service loyalty. These customer control and evaluation processes are captured in a set of propositions, advanced to serve future research. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A re-examination of the antecedents and impact of customer participation in service

Customer participation has been argued to be a critical influence on customer satisfaction with the service received, but empirical studies are relatively lacking. This study proposes a theoretical model of the antecedents and impact of customer participation in service and re-examines the relationships among organizational support, socialization, customer participation, and customer satisfaction. Findings of a questionnaire completed by tourists of a Taiwanese theme park indicated that: (1) customer perceptions of support and socialization significantly and positively influence customer participation; (2) perceived support and socialization have a significant and positive influence on customer satisfaction; (3) the directly positive relationship between customer participation and satisfaction is not supported in this study.     

Customer response to intangible and tangible service factors

This research investigates the question: Does the physical environment of service delivery settings influence customers' evaluations of the service experience and subsequent behavioral intentions? Theoretical and empirical data from environmental psychology suggests that customer reactions to the tangible physical environment may be more emotional than cognitive, particularly when involving hedonic consumption. This article integrates environmental psychology into SERVQUAL (a current measure of service quality) to enable a fuller assessment of the role of the tangible aspects of service delivery. Based on consumer surveys in three leisure service settings, the findings are that the tangible physical environment plays an important role in generating excitement in leisure settings; excitement, in turn, plays a significant role in determining customers repatronage intentions and willingness to recommend. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Customer satisfaction and qualities in public service: an intermediary customer perspective

From an intermediary customer perspective, this study empirically investigates the causal relationships between service quality, relationship quality, design quality, and customer satisfaction in the public service value chain. Cross-sectional survey data were collected from social work, childcare, and healthcare services and were analyzed using structural equation modeling. It is found that all the quality dimensions are antecedents to customer satisfaction and relations between quality dimensions show distinctive patterns. The results show that relationship quality does not directly affect customer satisfaction, but can indirectly influence satisfaction through the mediation of both service and design qualities. The effect of the relationship and design qualities on customer satisfaction is stronger than that of service quality.     

Joining forces: Top management team and board chair characteristics as antecedents of board service involvement

Boards in early stage high tech firms have an important role to play through their involvement in service tasks. Building on the attention based view of the firm and self-efficacy theory, we investigate the role of top management team (TMT) and board chair characteristics as antecedents of board service involvement (BSI). Studying a sample of 117 Norwegian early stage high tech firms, we find that TMT diversity positively affects BSI, whereas CEO duality negatively affects BSI. We further find that the industry experience of the board chair positively moderates the relationship between TMT size and BSI whereas CEO duality reinforces the TMT diversity-BSI relationship.     

Investigating antecedents of task commitment and task attraction in service learning team projects

The authors investigated the antecedents of team task cohesiveness in service learning classroom environments. Focusing on task commitment and task attraction as key dependent variables representing cohesiveness, and task interdependence as the primary independent variable, the authors position three important task action phase processes as mediators in the analyses. Overall, results provide strong support for hypothesized relationships. Task interdependence in student teams significantly influences task cohesiveness through these action phase processes. The authors highlight important implications for faculty who are interested in how to best structure student teams, particularly when course projects incorporate service learning.     

The effects of harm directions and service recovery strategies on customer forgiveness and negative word-of-mouth intentions

This study aims to investigate the direction of harm and the role of service recovery strategies on customer positive (i.e., forgiveness) and negative (i.e., word-of-mouth) intentions. We found that customer intentions are stronger among those who are directly affected by the service failure than indirectly affected customers. Further, we assess the role of service recovery in customer intentions after the service failure. The study findings contribute to the development of theory on the “other customers” effect by comparing the consequences of service failure directed at the focal customer and other customers and provide solutions to practitioners to reduce this damaging effect.     

Customer desire expectations about service employees: An analysis of hierarchical relations

This article proposes a hierarchical model of customers' desire expectations about service employees, and of the motivations underlying the expectations. The model is based on recent developments in means–end chain theory. A paper-and-pencil laddering methodology is applied to collect data among 231 customers in Austria concerning their desire expectations about service employees of clothing stores. Additive tree and social network analyses reveal three orientations in customer desire expectations, covering the process, outcome, and relational aspects of service encounters. Meanings within orientations are mutually linked and hierarchically organized from desire expectations about specific service employees' behaviors, via customer goal attainments and feelings, to behavioral responses. Implications for service marketing theory and practice are offered. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

To be engaged or not to be engaged: The antecedents and consequences of service employee engagement

Drawing on the Job Demand-Resource (JD-R) model, this study explores the antecedents and consequences of service employee engagement. The model examines the main effect of resources (autonomy, feedback, and support) on engagement and how the interaction among resources impacts engagement. Further, the model also examines the mediating role of engagement in linking resources to customers' perceived level of service employee performance. The study uses multi-level modeling on data from 482 service employees and customers in 66 retail stores. Results suggest that supervisory feedback is positively related to engagement while supervisory support is not. More engagement is related to more positive service employee performance. Regarding the interactions, supervisory support had a positive effect while supervisory feedback had a negative effect on engagement at high levels of perceived autonomy. Also, engagement was a full mediator between supervisory feedback and service employee performance. Implications for retail service management are discussed.     

Customer contact and the evaluation of service experiences: Propositions and implications for the design of services

A contingency framework is developed as a means of understanding the relationship between the level of customer contact and service satisfaction. Level of contact is defined as the extent of interpersonal interaction between the service customer and the service provider's boundary personnel. Consistent with Oliver (1997), perceived service satisfaction reflects the customer's judgment that the service delivered a plausible level of consumption-related fulfillment. The article offers a series of research propositions derived from prior research and writings from the marketing, psychology, and operations literatures. Implications for the design of service strategies in efforts to improve customer satisfaction are also discussed. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Customer compliance with employee fuzzy requests in service encounters: a self-determination theory perspective

Service Business - This research proposes a theoretical model to explain customer compliance with employee fuzzy requests in service encounters from a self-determination theory perspective....     

Customer satisfaction,corporate image,and service quality in professional services

This study explores the impact of corporate image and service quality on customer satisfaction in the professional service industries. Data were collected on audit firms, sending a questionnaire to financial executives of leading Italian companies. The results show that the most important variable explaining customer satisfaction was the apparent effectiveness of the audit firm. In relation to service quality, managers' satisfaction was primarily driven by their perception of audit firm's work as a useful value-adding service. The length of audit firm–auditee relation, the location of the auditor's office, and the financial executive's personal characteristics were also significant drivers of customer satisfaction.