Customer value,satisfaction, loyalty,and switching costs: An illustration from a business-to-business service context

Although researchers and managers pay increasing attention to customer value, satisfaction, loyalty, and switching costs, not much is known about their interrelationships. Prior research has examined the relationships within subsets of these constructs, mainly in the business-to-consumer (B2C) environment. The authors extend prior research by developing a conceptual framework linking all of these constructs in a business-to-business (B2B) service setting. On the basis of the cognition-affect-behavior model, the authors hypothesize that customer satisfaction mediates the relationship between customer value and customer loyalty, and that customer satisfaction and loyalty have significant reciprocal effects on each other. Furthermore, the potential interaction effect of satisfaction and switching costs, and the quadratic effect of satisfaction, on loyalty are explored. The authors test the hypotheses on data obtained from a courier service provider in a B2B context. The results support most of the hypotheses and, in particular, confirm the mediating role of customer satisfaction. Shun Yin Lam (asylam@ntu.edu.sg; fax: 65-6791-3697) is an assistant professor of marketing and international business in the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Lam received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario and has research interests in a number of areas including retail marketing, customer loyalty, and customers’ adoption and usage of technology. His work has appeared inMarketing Science, theJournal of Retailing, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, andAdvances in Consumer Research. Venkatesh (Venky) Shankar (vshankar@rhsmith.umd.edu) is Ralph J. Tyser Fellow and an associate professor of marketing in the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His areas of research are e-business, competitive strategy, international marketing, pricing, new product management, and supply chain management. His research has been published or is forthcoming in theJournal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, theJournal of Marketing, theStrategic Management Journal, theJournal of Retailing, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theJournal of Public Policy and Marketing, andMarketing Letters. he is co-editor of theJournal of Interactive Marketing; associate editor ofManagement Science; and serves on the editorial boards ofMarketing Science, theJournal of Marketing, theInternational Journal of Research in Marketing, theJournal of Retailing, and theJournal of Academy of Marketing Science. He is a three-time winner of the Krowe Award for Outstanding Teaching and teaches Marketing Management, Digital Business Strategy, Competitive Marketing Strategy, and International Marketing (http://www.venkyshankar.com). M. Krishna Erramilli (amkerramilli@ntu.edu.sg) is an associate professor of marketing and international business in the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has undertaken many studies on marketing strategy issues in service firms, particularly in an international context, and has published his work in journals like theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of International Business Studies, theColumbia Journal of World Business, and theJournal of Business Research. He has presented numerous papers at international conferences. His current research interests center on the international expansion of Asia-based service firms. Bvsan Murthy (abmurthy@ntu.edu.sg) is an associate professor of marketing and international business in the Nanyang Business School at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Prior to turning to the academe a decade ago, he had 20 years of international industry experience. He has published in journals likeThe Cornell H.R.A. Quarterly and theInternational Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and has also written industry white papers/monographs and chapters in books. His current research interests center on strategic services marketing/management and customer value management.     

Consumer switching costs: A typology,antecedents, and consequences

The management of customer switching costs has been hampered by the lack of a comprehensive typology for conceptualizing, categorizing, and measuring consumers' perceptions of these costs. This research develops a switching cost typology that identifies three types of switching costs: (1) procedural switching costs, primarily involving the loss of time and effort; (2) financial switching costs, involving the loss of financially quantifiable resources; and (3) relational switching costs, involving psychological or emotional discomfort due to the loss of identity and the breaking of bonds. The research then examines the antecedents and consequences of switching costs. The results suggest that consumers' perceptions of product complexity and provider heterogeneity, their breadth of product use, and their alternative provider and switching experience drive the switching costs they perceive. Furthermore, all three switching cost types significantly influence consumers' intentions to stay with their current service provider, explaining more variance than does satisfaction. In view of the potential importance of switching costs, the impact of all strategic moves on switching costs should be considered Michael Porter (1980:122). Thomas A. Burnham (Tburnham@scu.edu) (Ph.D., University of Texas) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. His research investigates the strategic management of consumer switching costs and the use of customer suggestions in product improvement. Prior to obtaining his doctorate, he developed strategic reports and budgets for MCI Telecommunications and consulted with the management of a cooperative in Paraguay as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. Judy K. Frels (Jfrels@rhsmith.umd.edu) (Ph.D., University of Texas) is an assistant professor of marketing in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the marketing of high-technology products, innovation adoption, and consumer switching costs. Prior to obtaining her Ph.D., she spent 10 years developing operating systems and compilers, as well as managing and marketing software and hardware products at IBM and at Tymlabs Corporation. She has consulted with firms including SAIC, Imation, Input-Output, Inc., and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Vijay Mahajan (Vmahajan@mail.utexas.edu) is John P. Harbin Centennial Chair in Business, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin. He is currently serving as dean of the Indian school of Management, Hyderabad, India. He has published extensively on innovation diffusion, new product development, and strategic marketing.     

信任式服务的顾客忠诚形成机制及实践启示

信任式服务因其专业性和（或）“纯服务”等鲜明特征而使之显著区别于其他类型的服务,其顾客忠诚形成机制也因此具有独特性。针对医疗服务的实证分析表明：在信任式服务中,顾客信任在顾客忠诚形成机制体中起着关键性的作用,形成“服务质量→顾客信任→感知价值→顾客满意→顾客忠诚”的逻辑链;服务互动质量和结果质量通过顾客信任对顾客感知价值和顾客满意产生影响,进而影响顾客忠诚,但服务环境质量对顾客信任和顾客忠诚没有显著影响。因此,对顾客形成机制的研究需要区分产品和服务的类型以及服务质量的类型。提供信任式服务的组织应该重视并加强对服务人员与顾客互动能力的培养,提升服务人员与顾客的服务互动质量,并切实保障和提高服务结果质量,从而增强顾客信任,提升顾客忠诚。     

转换成本在顾客满意度与忠诚度之间关系中的作用——兼宽带客户转换成本的归纳性分析

转换成本是近年来顾客满意和顾客忠诚研究的焦点问题,是解释顾客忠诚形成机理的重要因素,是帮助人们更深入理解满意度与忠诚度之间关系的重要工具.文章回顾了转换成本的内涵及其分类,论证了转换成本在顾客满意与顾客忠诚关系中的作用,以宽带服务为背景对客户感知的转换成本进行了归纳性分析,指出了基于转换成本建立顾客忠诚的对策建议.     

基于服务公平性的顾客满意感与忠诚感关系——面向武汉酒店业的实证研究

在高度竞争的市场环境中,赢得顾客并与顾客维持长久关系是非常重要的,而这种长久关系的建立在很大程度上是以顾客满意为基础的。因此,如何提高顾客满意度、培育和维系忠诚的顾客群体是现代企业生存和发展亟待解决的重要课题。本论文提出了一个包含服务公平性、顾客感知质量、顾客感知价值、顾客满意感和顾客忠诚感概念模型及18项相关研究假设,并在武汉市20家酒店展开了问卷调查,最后采用规范的、科学的实证研究方法对此概念模型和研究假设进行了检验。     

顾客满意向顾客忠诚的转换机理研究综述

随着市场竞争的加剧和顾客争夺成本的提高,顾客满意向顾客忠诚的转换机理已经引起理论界和实践界的广泛关注。文章基于国外相关文献评述,对顾客满意向顾客忠诚转换过程中的影响变量进行分析和概括,总结顾客满意向顾客忠诚的转换模型及其机制,探讨转换成本对顾客满意与顾客忠诚关系的调节功能。     

快餐业服务质量对顾客忠诚影响的实证研究

服务质量是影响顾客忠诚的重要因素,是近年服务营销领域研究的热点课题。选取接受快餐业服务的顾客为调研样本,运用因子分析、结构方程模型等统计分析方法,从多维度来研究服务质量与顾客忠诚的关系。结果表明,快餐业服务质量由有形性、响应性、可靠性、保证性和移情性五个维度组成,各个维度对顾客忠诚的影响效果是不同的。     

顾客体验对服务品牌忠诚影响的实证研究

品牌忠诚是品牌资产的重要组成部分,是战略性品牌资产。虽有研究顾客体验与服务品牌忠诚之间关系的理论演绎文献,但缺乏实证文献。本文以移动通信服务行业为研究对象,从价值——满意视角探索了顾客体验对服务品牌忠诚的影响机理。在问卷调查的基础上,运用结构方程模型方法进行实证研究,结果表明：顾客体验对服务品牌忠诚的直接影响不显著;而顾客体验通过体验价值和顾客满意对服务品牌忠诚的间接影响显著。     

Service failure and recovery: The impact of relationship factors on customer satisfaction

This research investigated how customers' relationships with a service organization affect their reactions to service failure and recovery. Our conceptual model proposed that customer-organizational relationships help to shape customers' attributions and expectations when service failures occur. The empirical results showed that customers with higher expectations of relationship continuity had lower service recovery expectations after a service failure and also attributed that failure to a less stable cause. Both the lower recovery expectations and the lower stability attributions were associated with greater satisfaction with the service performance after the recovery. These effects appeared to be key processes by which relationships buffer service organizations when service failures occur. Ronald L. Hess Jr. (ron. hess@business.wm.edu) (Ph.D., Virginia Tech) is currently an assistant professor of marketing at the College of William & Mary. His research interests include customer responses to service and product failures; organizational complaint handling; and customer assessments of satisfaction, loyalty, and service quality. He has published his research inMarketing Letters and several conference proceedings. Shankar Ganesan (sganesan @bpa.arizona.edu) (Ph.D., University of Florida) is an associate professor of marketing and Lisle and Rosslyn Payne Fellow in Marketing at the Eller College of Business and Public Administration, University of Arizona. His research interests focus on the areas of interorganizational relationships, buyer-seller negotiations, service failure and recovery, new product innovation, and E-marketing. He is the author of several articles that have appeared in leading academic journals, including theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of Applied Psychology. He currently serves on the editorial review board of theJournal of Marketing Research and theJournal of Marketing. Noreen M. Klein (nklein@vt.edu) (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) is currently an associate professor of marketing at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her research interests include consumer decision making and the behavioral aspects of pricing, and her research has been published in the theJournal of Consumer Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Making, and theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science.     

Service quality, trust, specific asset investment, and expertise: Direct and indirect effects in a satisfaction-loyalty framework

This study proposes an integrated framework explaining loyalty responses in high-involvement, high-service luxury product markets. The model is rooted in the traditional (attribute satisfaction)-(overall satisfaction)-(loyalty) chain but explicitly incorporates facility versus interactive service quality, trust, specific asset investment (SAI), and product-market expertise. The authors focus on disentangling the direct versus indirect effects of model constructs on attitudinal versus behavioral loyalty responses. The results support the traditional chain but also show loyalty can be increased by building a trustworthy image and creating exchange-specific assets. The authors found that overall satisfaction is the precursor both to loyalty and to building SAI. Finally, consumers have different costs in reducing adverse selection problems with information, and thus the negative effect of product-market expertise on behavioral loyalty needs to be controlled if the direct versus indirect effects of model constructs on loyalty are to be disentangled. Jyh-Shen Chiou (jschiou@nccu.edu.tw) (PhD in marketing, Michigan State University) is a professor of marketing in the Department of International Business at National Chengchi University, Taipei. His research interests include satisfaction and loyalty, strategic marketing, and international marketing. His work has been published in theJournal of Service Research, Psychology & Marketing, theEuropean Journal of Marketing, theJournal of Interactive Marketing, Information & Management, theJournal of Social Psychology, theJournal of Business Logistics, Advances in Consumer Research, and other scholarly journals. He has taught courses in marketing research, strategic marketing, and global marketing. Cornelia Droge (droge@msu.edu) is a professor of marketing in the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management, at Michigan State University. Her research interests focus on satisfaction/ loyalty and strategic marketing (especially areas related to the interface of marketing with logistics, supply chain, and operations). Her work has appeared inManagement Science, theStrategic Management Journal, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Business Logistics, theJournal of Operations Management, theJournal of Product Innovation Management, and other scholarly journals. She is also coauthor of three books.     

酒店服务质量与顾客满意度研究综述

酒店服务质量的高低直接关系到酒店经营效益的好坏,本文综述了酒店服务质量与顾客满意度的相关文献,发现顾客满意度的提高能够大大减少酒店经营成本。本文还探讨了酒店服务和顾客满意度的涵义、测评指标和模型,这对我国酒店业相关研究及酒店的管理实践具有很重要的借鉴意义。     

饭店顾客满意、顾客忠诚与经营绩效的关系研究

回顾了顾客满意、顾客忠诚、经营绩效的相关文献并提炼出测量三个变量的指标。基于服务利润链的內在原理,结合饭店企业的特点,构建了概念化模型并提出五个假设。实证研究选取三家三星级饭店进行问卷调查。对问卷的效度和信度进行检验,对顾客满意、顾客忠诚与企业经营绩效之间的关系进行了相关性分析,研究结果支持所提假设。     

基于产业组织理论视角的顾客转换成本研究

在一定意义上,顾客转换成本可以看作一种特异性投资,便于企业形成一定程度的市场势力,影响同行企业竞争,提升自身绩效,因此顾客转换成本理论成为近年来学术界研究的重要领域之一。本文将基于产业组织理论S-C-P范式的视角对国内外学者在顾客转换成本方面的研究进行分类综述,并对顾客转换成本的未来研究和应用提出了几点展望。     

基于顾客价值的酒店服务表现评估框架分析

服务是酒店管理的核心要素,它直接关系到客人对酒店的整体评价。不过,现有酒店业在服务表现评估中存在诸多问题．为了能够客观地评估和真实地反映酒店总体的服务表现。在已有研究的基础上引入顾客价值理论。提出了基于顾客价值的酒店服务表现评估框架．分别概括为顾客价值要素研究、评估模式研究、调查实施及策略分析4个阶段,对每一阶段都给出了指导性的操作办法,希望借此研究对酒店服务质量管理提供意见参考。     

服务技术创新与服务忠诚关系模型的创建及应用

从顾客感知的角度探讨服务技术创新的结果表现、效率、易用性、感知控制、便利性和感知风险等特点与服务忠诚的关系,研究表明：服务技术创新的结果表现、效率和易用性与服务质量正相关;便利性对服务忠诚具有直接的正向作用,感知控制与服务质量和感知价值都无显著相关;而顾客的感知风险与服务质量和服务忠诚之间存在负相关;同时也证实了服务质量和感知价值都对服务忠诚具有正向影响的观点。服务企业应积极地进行技术创新,尤其要重视能吸引消费者尝试使用并重复使用的因素,并把监控与减少消费者的风险感知作为吸引消费者使用创新性服务技术并培养其忠诚的重要工作。     

The theoretical underpinnings of customer asset management: A framework and propositions for future research

Most research in customer asset management has focused on specific aspects of the value of the customer to the company. The purpose of this article is to propose an integrated framework, called CUSAMS (customer asset management of services), that enables service organizations (1) to make a comprehensive assessment of the value of their customer assets and (2) to understand the influence of marketing instruments on them. The foundation of the CUSAMS framework is a careful specification of key customer behaviors that reflect the length, depth, and breadth of the customer-service organization relationship: duration, usage, and cross-buying. This framework is the starting point for a set of propositions regarding how marketing instruments influence customer behavior within the relationship, thereby influencing the value of the customer asset. The framework and propositions provide the impetus for a research agenda that identifies critical issues in customer asset management. Ruth N. Bolton (ruth.bolton@owen.vanderbilt.edu) is a professor of marketing in the Owen Graduate School of Business at Vanderbilt University. Her current research is concerned with high-technology services sold to business-to-business customers. Her most recent work in this area studies how organizations can grow the value of their customer base through customer service and support. Her earlier published research investigates how organizations’ service and pricing strategies influence customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as company revenues and profits. She has published articles in theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Retailing, theJournal of Service Research, Marketing Letters, Marketing Science, and other journals. Katherine N. Lemon (katherine.lemon@bc.edu) is an associate professor in the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College. Her current research investigates the antecedents and consequences of customer-firm relationships. In addition, her research examines relevant metrics for measuring and managing the value of customer relationships. Her earlier published research investigates how emotional reactions (such as anticipated regret) inflence customer retention decisions. She has published articles in theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Service Research, Marketing Science, theJournal of Product Innovation Management, and other journals. Peter C. Verhoef (verhoef@few.eur.nl) is an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His main research interest is customer asset management. He has also done research on other topics, such as waiting times, private labels, and out-of-stocks. He has been a visiting professor at the Tuck School of Business Dartmouth College in fall 2003. He has published a wide variety of articles in journals such as theJournal of Marketing, theJournal of Marketing Research, theJournal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and theJournal of Consumer Psychology.     

When customers disappoint: A model of relational internal marketing and customer complaints

The objective of this study is to examine internal marketing relationships and their influence on salesperson attitudes and behaviors in retail store environments. The authors investigate the moderating role of customer complaining behavior on the nature of these relationships. Specifically, they examine the relationship between organization-employee and supervisor-employee relationships and their association with salesperson job motivation and commitment to customer service. Customer complaints are expected to have differential moderating effects on the relationship between organizational and supervisory support and these salesperson outcomes. Our hypotheses were tested using a sample of 392 retail employees within 115 stores of a national retail organization. The model was partially supported. Theoretical and managerial implications are explored.     

网店客服管理难题与对策

网络购物的快速发展催生了一个新兴的网店客服职业。在网店客服管理中存在着招人难、管人难、留人难三大难题。管理者需要从加强校企合作和企企合作、强化对客服的培训和激励、重视网店的组织凝聚力建设三个方面入手,以实现客服人员的＂招得上＂、＂用得好＂和＂留得住＂。     

房地产服务顾客满意度研究

本文通过对房地产服务客户满意度影响因素的探讨,提出了房地产业顾客满意度的结构方程模型,并对模型进行配适度检验。研究结果发现：（1）在直接效果部分：职业道德对顾客满意度之因果关系并未获得显著性支持;而服务质量对顾客满意度有显著的正向影响;（2）在间接效果部分：职业道德及服务质量透过顾客价值对顾客满意度都有显著的正向影响。     

文化对服务质量与顾客感知价值关系的影响——基于Meta分析

在国内管理学领域首次采用Meta分析方法，探讨了服务质量和顾客感知价值关系的普遍性以及民族文化对两者关系影响的一般规律，结果显示，两者关系具有普遍性，在权力距离高、集体主义、男性化和非欧洲文化中两者的关系增强。