Jc Ko de Ruyter

Linking perceived service quality and service loyalty : a multi-dimensional perspective

In recent research on service quality it has been argued that the relationship between perceived service quality and service loyalty is an issue which requires conceptual and empirical elaboration through replication and extension of current knowledge. Focuses on the refinement of a scale for measuring service loyalty dimensions and the relationships between dimensions of service quality and these service loyalty dimensions. The results of an empirical study of a large sample of customers from four different service industries suggest that four dimensions of service loyalty can be identified: purchase intentions, word‐of‐mouth communication; price sensitivity; and complaining behaviour. Further analysis yields an intricate pattern of service quality‐service loyalty relationships at the level of the individual dimensions with notable differences across industries.

Customer Adoption of E-service: an Experimental Study

So far, the term e‐commerce has been primarily associated with communicating the brand and/or enabling sales transactions. However, the next vista for companies operating in the virtual marketplace seems to be e‐service or, delivering value‐added, interactive services to customers. This e‐business function has been left virtually unexplored in the services research literature. In this article, an attempt is made to investigate the impact of organizational reputation, relative advantage, and perceived risk on perceived service quality, trust and behavioral intentions of customers towards adopting e‐services. In the context of an electronic travel service, hypotheses on the relationships between aforementioned variables are investigated by means of an experimental study. The results suggest that the three factors have a significant main effect on the customers’ attitude and behavior towards e‐service. The only exception is that relative advantage does not appear to have a significant impact on customer trust. The results also show that organizational reputation and perceived risk have a combined effect: a good organizational reputation impacts the effect of perceived risk on the three dependent variables. Finally, the three factors appeared to be evenly important in the forming of customers’ attitude and behavior. Again, the only exception is that organizational reputation and perceived risk appear to be more important in terms of trust than relative advantage.

The dynamics of the service delivery process : a value-based approach

Recent research linking service quality and service satisfaction has raised issues which require conceptual and empirical elaboration. Among these are the formation of satisfaction during the service delivery process and the role of customer value. In this article, the focus is on how different stages in the service delivery process can be profiled in terms of three axiological value dimensions and how each stage relates to an overall satisfaction judgement. The results of a cross-cultural study are reported in which the museum visit was chosen as the service delivery process. Our findings suggest that the museum visit can be broken down into a number of distinct stages and that the influence of the individual stages on overall satisfaction depends on the combinations of stages that are encountered by museum visitors.

Customer equity considerations in service recovery : a cross-industry perspective

Service recovery, or “doing things very right the second time” has been identified as a strategic issue in the services marketing and management literature. So far, much of the research on this phenomenon has departed from the disconfirmation paradigm. However, since perceptions of fairness play such an important role in service recovery situations, it seems desirable to supplement extant literature with the equity paradigm. Therefore, we designed an experimental study to assess the impact of customer equity considerations on perceived quality, satisfaction, loyalty and trust with respect to service recovery across different service industries. Our findings reveal that in general, distributional fairness and procedural fairness during the service recovery significantly improve scores for service quality, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and trust, whereas interactional fairness only enhances customer trust perceptions. Furthermore, our results suggest that the effects of equity considerations in a service recovery situation are idiosyncratic to specific service industries.

Antecedents and consequences of the service climate in boundary-spanning self-managing service teams

In this article, the authors examine antecedents and consequences of the service climate in boundary-spanning self-managing teams (SMTs) that deliver financial services. Using data from members of 61 SMTs and their customers, the authors show a differential impact of the SMT service climate on various marketing performance measures. Furthermore, they obtain support for independent group-level effects of intrateam support and team member flexibility on employee perceptions of the SMT service climate. Both effects are persistent over time and demonstrate that collective perceptions in the SMT have incremental value in the explanation of the service climate.

An assessment of equivalence between online and mail surveys in service research

This article examines whether online and mail surveys produce convergent results, which would allow them to be used in mixed-mode service quality studies. In the context of a large business-to-business service quality assessment, an analysis of the accuracy and completeness of respondent answers to both open and closed questions suggests that online and mail surveys produce equivalent results. Composite reliability shows consistently high levels for both groups, and the means and variance-covariance matrices are equal across modes. However, minor differences occur between the two survey methods; online respondents provide more improvement suggestions, indicate more often to which competitor they want to switch, and provide lengthier answers in response to requests for examples of positive experiences with the company. This research provides important findings regarding the process for, and results of, comparing two survey modes.

Adaptive versus Proactive Behavior in Service Recovery: The Role of Self-Managing Teams

In this article, we develop a conceptual model of adaptive versus proactive recovery behavior by self-managing teams (SMTs) in service recovery operations. To empirically test the conceptual model a combination of bank employee, customer, and archival data is collected. The results demonstrate support for independent group-level effects of intrateam support on adaptive and proactive recovery behavior, indicating that perceptual consensus within service teams has incremental value in explaining service recovery performance. In addition, we provide evidence that adaptive and proactive recovery behavior have differential effects on external performance measures. More specifically, higher levels of adaptive performance positively influence customer-based parameters (i.e., service recovery satisfaction and loyalty intentions), while employee proactive recovery behavior contributes to higher share of customer rates.

The Impact of Perceived Listening Behavior in Voice-to-Voice Service Encounters:

Call centers have become an important customer access channel as well as an important source of customerrelated information. This boundary-spanning unit has finally enabled companies to take marketing’s commonplace wisdom of listening to the customer literally. As a result, there has been an increase in voice-to-voice service encounters and in these encounters listening as an essential skill. In this article, three dimensions of listening behavior are discerned: attentiveness, perceptiveness, and responsiveness. Results of an empirical study reveal that attentiveness is a direct driver of encounter satisfaction, whereas perceptiveness is primarily related to trust. Furthermore, the responsiveness dimension is related positively to both satisfaction and trust. In addition, we find a significant association between satisfaction and trust, and, finally, both a satisfactory evaluation of the voice-tovoice encounter and the build up of trust have a significant impact on the customer’s intention to contact the call center again in the future.

The role of corporate image and extension similarity in service brand extensions

In this article we examine the role of corporate image in extending service brands to new and traditional markets in the telecommunications sector. With regards to corporate image, service brand extensions are primarily associated with innovation-related attributes, such as order of entry (i.e., pioneers versus followers). Increasingly, firms are extending their services to markets that are beyond the markets that they traditionally have been active in. The results of an experimental study show that consumers evaluate service extensions by providers with an innovative late mover image more favourably that service extensions by companies with a pioneer image in terms of perceived corporate credibility and expected service quality. With regards to these evaluation criteria, it was also found that consumers prefer service brand extensions to related rather than unrelated markets. In addition we find that the relative distance between service providers with an innovative late mover image and pioneers is larger in related markets.

Antecedents and Consequences of Group Potency: A Study of Self-Managing Service Teams

This paper proposes and tests a model of antecedents and consequences of group potency in self-managing teams in retail banking. Based on data collected from boundary-spanning service employees organized in 60 teams and their customers, our findings reveal a significant positive impact of group potency on customer-perceived service quality and a negative effect on service profitability. In addition, we find that team consensus regarding group potency positively moderates the effects of group potency, so that for teams with higher levels of potency consensus, the positive impact of group potency on customer-perceived service quality is stronger, whereas the negative impact of group potency on service productivity is weaker. Furthermore, we find significant positive effects of management and interteam support and functional diversity as well as a significant negative effect of team tenure on individual team member beliefs of group potency. Finally, social support consensus moderates the effects of management support, interteam support, and team tenure on group potency, so that the effects of these antecedents are weaker for teams with higher levels of social support consensus. Thus, we conclude that team confidence consensus increases the positive impact of group potency on customer perceptions of service quality and decreases the negative impact on profitability. Thus, team-member perceptual agreement on their teams potency should be stimulated.