Suchergebnisse

For decades we've been told that we live in fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world, that loyalty gets you nowhere, and that we must look out for number one! We've been told that to succeed we have to constantly reinvent ourselves, let go of past relationships, and move on to greener pastures. And we've been told that all this is good. But it's not good. Why Loyalty Matters is grounded in the most comprehensive study of loyalty ever conducted, and what it reveals can change your life. The science is very clear – when it comes to business success, satisfaction in our relationships and even overall happiness, loyalty is essential. Renowned loyalty experts Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy combine their own groundbreaking research with the leading thinking in philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics and management to provide a comprehensive guide to understanding what loyalty is, what it isn't and how to unlock its power in your personal and professional life

This special issue delves deeply into the pivotal challenge of sustainability, using the lens of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Global Compact as its foundation. Emphasizing the multifaceted nature of sustainability, the discussion spotlights its interdisciplinary and multistakeholder character, making a strong case that services research should be the epicenter of sustainability research and action. We introduce a new definition of "service sustainability" that brings together diverse fields such as policymaking, engineering, resource management, and education. This definition is not just an academic construct; it carries important managerial and policy implications. Organizations, both in the corporate and governmental sectors, are urged to adapt services that cater to present-day demands with a foresight that ensures the flourishing of future generations. At its heart, this updated approach emphasizes improving services while being aware of the social, environmental, and economic aspects of our connected world.

There has been an extensive exploration of how organizational climate is related to various business outcomes, but these studies have generally examined outcomes separately or developed univariate measures that combine outcomes. These approaches fail to (a) accommodate the multivariate character of important business results and (b) facilitate the firm's need to achieve success on several dimensions. This research proposes a methodological approach new to the service domain to address these issues. Using data from a large, multinational retail grocery superstore based in continental Western Europe, this study illustrates how multivariate partial least squares (MPLS) models can be used. MPLS provides three interpretable factors of climate—Overall Organizational Climate, Self-Efficacy Versus Leader's Efficacy, and Personal Empowerment Versus Management Facilitation —that are important predictors of three business outcomes: employee retention, customer satisfaction, and scaled revenue. The use of the MPLS approach in other services domains is also explored.

Electronic recommendation agents have the potential to increase the level of service provided by firms operating in the online environment. Recommendation agents assist consumers in making product decisions by generating rank-ordered alternative lists based on consumer preferences. However, many of the online agents currently in use rank options in different ways than the consumers they are designed to help. Two experiments examine the role of similarity between an electronic agent and a consumer, in terms of actual similarity of attribute weights and perceived similarity of decision strategies, on the quality of consumer choices. Results indicate that it helps consumers to use a recommendation agent that thinks like them, either in terms of attribute weights or decision strategies. When agents are completely dissimilar, consumers may be no better, and sometimes worse off, using an agent's ordered list than if they simply used a randomly ordered list of options.

Share of wallet is a concept that is growing in popularity among satisfaction researchers. There is no empirical research, however, examining the relationship between satisfaction, retention, and share of wallet. This is largely the result of the inherent difficulty collecting true share of wallet information in most business categories. If the impact of satisfaction on share of wallet is the same as satisfaction on retention, then managers can simply substitute more easily obtainable retention data. Therefore, this research examines the appropriateness of using actual purchase as a proxy for the more difficult to attain share of wallet in two distinct industries, Class 8 trucks and pharmaceuticals. The findings indicate that the top performance attributes in terms of predictive ability are the same and in the same order for each outcome, suggesting that for some firms, actual purchase may represent an acceptable proxy for share of wallet when deriving opportunities for service improvement.

The service sector has been rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic. This stems in large part from the inseparable, high-contact nature of many services. During a pandemic, multiple forms of contact – customer-to-customer, customer-to-employee, employee-to-employee, and customer/employee-to-air/surfaces – can lead to serious illness or death. The urgent need for increased separability and decreased contact have led to a wave of service adaptations (firms' efforts to improve safety) and service transformations (innovations that bolster safety while offering additional benefits that are superior to what existed previously). COVID-19 has made service safety paramount, with most attention being paid to minimizing disease transmission. However, safety needs in a pandemic extend beyond physical to include interrelated domains of emotional, financial, and information safety. Physical safety is the absence of harm or injury. Emotional safety is relief from mental distress arising from pandemic-related personal traumas. Financial safety concerns minimizing economic insecurity related to the pandemic. Information safety refers to people's sense of confidence that they have the information they need to make good decisions, information that is trustworthy. We describe the unique service transformations addressing these safety concerns of Hong Kong International Airport, Henry Ford Health System (Detroit), Innocent Bystander (Australia), and Service Now that are likely to continue after the pandemic has passed. Important questions for service researchers to guide managers in reinventing how they create, deliver, and market services are highlighted.

The generally accepted view among managers and researchers is that the greater the severity of a service failure, the greater the resulting impact on customer satisfaction and business outcomes, such as lost customers and revenue. The research used to defend this viewpoint, however, does not typically address the severity of service failures, like those that result in injury or death (i.e., product-harm crises). This research addresses this issue by examining both minor incidents (i.e., failures that do not result in physical harm) and major incidents (i.e., failures that result in injury or death) in the U.S. airline industry, and the corresponding impact on the customer satisfaction and market share of the firms affected. Our results indicate that minor incidents are more strongly (negatively) related to future market share than are major incidents. Moreover, our findings indicate that only minor incidents are significantly linked to customer satisfaction. We argue that these findings occur for two reasons: First, most customers believe major incidents to be low probability events that are less salient when compared to more probable failures. Second, consumers impacted by major incidents most likely defect and are therefore not captured in future customer satisfaction surveys. Consequently, managers can delude themselves that things have "returned to normal" after a major incident when relying on customer satisfaction scores alone.

Abstract
Does customer satisfaction really lead to increased firm value? Traditionally, most financial valuation models do not include customer-related metrics such as customer satisfaction in the process. Studies in marketing, on the other hand, have consistently found that customer satisfaction improves the ability to predict future cash flows, long-term financial measures, stock performance, and shareholder value. This research examines the impact that customer satisfaction has on firm value by employing valuation models borrowed directly from the practice of finance. The data used in the analysis is compiled by merging publicly available customer satisfaction data from the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) with financial data from COMPUSTAT, and Center for Research in Securities Prices between 1996 and 2006. The results indicate that a portfolio of stocks consisting of firms with high levels and positive changes in customer satisfaction will outperform lower satisfaction portfolios along with Standard & Poor's 500… Customer satisfaction does matter!

Empirical studies in marketing conceptualize commitment as a three-component construct comprised of affective, normative, and calculative commitment. We develop and empirically test a five-component typology of consumer commitment— affective, normative, economic, forced, and habitual commitment. The broadened conceptualization of commitment is tested using qualitative and quantitative studies with data from 9,000 consumers and 10 countries. The broadened five-component commitment model demonstrates high levels of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, and stability, as well as unique associations with repurchase intentions. Managerially, it provides a roadmap for optimizing commitment: while forced commitment should be minimized, economic and habitual commitment should be enhanced. These prescriptions vary for goods and services. Namely, affective, normative, and habitual commitment exhibit stronger positive effects on repurchase intentions for goods than for services; the opposite pattern is found for economic commitment. By showing how managers should optimize specific commitment dimensions rather than simply maximize overall commitment, while accounting for contextual factors such as differences between goods and services, our results provide an actionable strategic blueprint for firms' customer commitment strategy.

Customers can interact with and create value for firms in a variety of ways. This article proposes that assessing the value of customers based solely upon their transactions with a firm may not be sufficient, and valuing this engagement correctly is crucial in avoiding undervaluation and overvaluation of customers. We propose four components of a customer's engagement value (CEV) with a firm. The first component is customer lifetime value (the customer's purchase behavior), the second is customer referral value (as it relates to incentivized referral of new customers), the third is customer influencer value (which includes the customer's behavior to influence other customers, that is increasing acquisition, retention, and share of wallet through word of mouth of existing customers as well as prospects), and the fourth is customer knowledge value (the value added to the firm by feedback from the customer). CEV provides a comprehensive framework that can ultimately lead to more efficient marketing strategies that enable higher long-term contribution from the customer. Metrics to measure CEV, future research propositions regarding relationships between the four components of CEV are proposed and marketing strategies that can leverage these relationships suggested.

Adoption of new services in the marketplace, and the impact that word of mouth (WOM) has on adoption, has long been of interest to marketers. Managers have therefore become increasingly interested in measuring WOM activity most commonly through the recommend intention metric. The circumstances under which the predictive ability of this metric can be established, however, are not clear. This research provides the first longitudinal examination of the relationship bet ween recommend intention and the adoption of a new-to-market service (NTMS) brand extension. Analysis is conducted using anonymized data provided by a large U.S. telecommunications provider for 791 customers and their corresponding telephone network (11,552 individuals). The findings indicate an interaction effect where recommend intention predicts new service adoption only when the recommending customers are more recent adopters of the service and are in more frequent contact with the potential customer. Therefore, when managers are using the recommend intention metric to predict adoption, there is a need to take into consideration the exposure of the individual to others in their network and the timing of their adoption.

This paper highlights the importance of innovation in driving economic growth, noting that traditional measures of innovation have focused mainly on manufacturing-related metrics like patents and R&D activities. It addresses the need for new measures that better reflect innovation in service-dominant economies. Specifically, the study highlights nation-level measures of customer perceived firm innovativeness and examines their relationship with firm financial performance. Using data from the American Innovation Index covering 123 publicly traded firms across 20 industries over 5 years (2018–2022), the research finds that customers' perceptions of a firm's innovativeness are significant predictors of future abnormal stock returns. Additionally, it reveals a positive relationship between changes in customer satisfaction levels, as measured by the American Customer Satisfaction Index, and abnormal stock returns. Together, these findings point to the importance of customer perceptions on firm performance.