Book Description

This study revisits the customer loyalty debate in ongoing service relationships. The current loyalty paradigm of relationship marketing is the satisfaction-loyalty chain, in which customer loyalty is a one-dimensional concept of intensive usage and promotion (Zeithaml, Berry & Parasuraman, 1996), and in which customer satisfaction, trust and commitment form the full mediation mechanism between any service or relational stimulus and customer loyalty (e.g. Aurier & NGoala, 2010). Besides being a loyal customer, customers can also contribute to the customer experience and the service organization by fulfilling a variety of organizational roles and functions (e.g. Fliess, Dyck & Smelter, 2014). This study theorized and found empirical support that, in ongoing service relationships,1) A customers self-reported contribution behaviors that are motivated in loyalty (Loyal Contribution) constitute an expression of loyalty which is independent from the traditional loyalty concept contained in the satisfaction-loyalty chain. 2) Grounded Relationship Quality, defined as the degree to which customers meta-cognitively qualify their ongoing service relationship as one in which structural relationship qualities are concretely constructed and enacted together with the service organization, effectuates a direct effect on Loyal Contribution, with no mediation role for satisfaction, trust, commitment or loyalty.3) Grounded Relationship Quality is an important mediator of the effect of customer trust on customer commitment. This study is also original in having observed that not commitment but overall customer satisfaction is the strongest driver of traditional loyalty in ongoing service relationships, whereby trust and commitment are key attributes and key antecedents of overall satisfaction. The empirically validated model of primary structural relationships shows the key theoretical implication of this study: in ongoing service relationships customers mental relationship states between satisfaction and loyalty should be studied as an omni-directional plane, rather than as a one-directional chain. This plane is defined by the two dimensions of customer contribution and psychological distance, and is referred to as the State of Relationship.