Ruben Chumpitaz

Service quality and marketing performance in business‐to‐business markets: exploring the mediating role of client satisfaction

Drawing on relevant literature, the authors empirically test a model of business loyalty in a sample of 234 clients of information systems suppliers, integrating the concepts of service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty. The study builds on recent advances in services marketing theory and assesses the relationships underlying the identified constructs in the specific industry. A clear pattern of service quality dimensions is established following the Gronroos conceptualisation. Several important findings are reported, including the empirical verification of the mediating role of industrial satisfaction in the formation of loyalty attributes. Industrial satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between accessibility and loyalty and partially mediates latent constructs relationship with technical assistance and delivery service. The results provide robust evidence concerning the direct effect of industrial satisfaction on loyalty. accessibility, delivery, and product reliability as antecedents of industrial satisfaction.

Hedonic price function estimation in economics and marketing: revisiting Lancaster’s issue of “noncombinable” goods

Following Lancaster’s (J. Political Econ. 74(1):132–157, 1966; Variety, equity and efficiency, 1979) interpretation of his characteristics approach to consumer theory, this contribution focuses on theoretical and empirical arguments questioning the smoothness of traditional hedonic price estimation techniques. Lancaster argued strongly against “combinability”, i.e., that any efficient combination of characteristics is feasible and sensible. We therefore explicitly test the impact of convexity using a set of recent non-parametric estimators. The test is carried out on a sample of 114 digital cameras whose price evolution is followed over 6 months. The hypothesis of convexity is rejected using the Li (Econ. Rev. 15(3):261–274, 1996) test. The conclusions point out implications for economics and marketing.

Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Value and Loyalty An Empirical Investigation In A Service Failure Context

It is widely acknowledged that well-designed customer-service programs enhance customer satisfaction, customer retention, market share, revenue, and profits. These issues are of particular importance in the airline industry, in which the delivery of high-quality service to passengers has been shown to be essential. However, although the link between airline service quality and passenger satisfaction has been established empirically, the exact nature of the relationships that exist among the constructs of airline service quality, passenger satisfaction, and loyalty remains unclear (Park et al., 2004).

Comparing efficiency across markets : an extension and critique of the Zhang and Bartels (1998) methodology.

The use of non-parametric frontier methods for the evaluation of product market efficiency in heterogeneous markets seems to have gained some popularity recently. However, the statistical properties of these frontier estimators have been largely ignored. The main point is that nonparametric frontier estimators are biased and that the degree of bias depends on specific sample properties, most importantly sample size and number of dimensions of the model. To investigate the effect of this bias on comparing market efficiency, this contribution estimates the efficiency for several datasets for two main product categories. Following Zhang and Bartels (1998), these results comprise re-estimates for the larger samples limiting their size to that of the smaller samples when the model dimensions for different samples are identical. Furthermore, sample sizes are adjusted to mitigate the eventual differences in dimensions in specification. This allows comparing market efficiency for different markets on a more equal footing, since it reduces the bias effect to a minimum making the comparison of market efficiency possible. However, the article also points out the critical limitations of this Zhang and Bartels (1998) approach in certain respects. Apart from reporting these negative results, we also offer some suggestions for future work.

Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Value and Loyalty: An Empirical Investigation of the Airline Services Industry

Successful businesses are increasingly aware of the importance of service delivery in generating competitive advantages, loyal customers, and long-term economic success (Wagner 1994; Jones and Sasser 1995; Liu et al., 2000). It is widely acknowledged that well-designed customer-service programs enhance customer satisfaction, customer retention, market share, revenue, and profits (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990; Rust and Zahorik, 1993, 1995; Anderson et al., 1994; Jones and Sasser, 1995; Anderson et al., 1997; Loveman, 1998; Hoffman and Kelley, 2000; Johnston, 2001). These issues are of particular importance in the airline industry, in which the delivery of high-quality service to passengers has been shown to be essential (Sultan and Simpson, 2000; Aksoy et al., 2003; Park et al., 2004; Chen and Chang, 2005; Chen, 2008). However, although the link between airline service quality and passenger satisfaction has been established empirically, the exact nature of the relationships that exist among the constructs of airline service quality, passenger satisfaction, and loyalty remains unclear (Park et al., 2004). The role of value in the airline industry is also unclear. Because service failures can occur in airline services as they can occur in the best-run companies in any business setting, improved complaint management and service recovery are obviously important (Boshoff, 1997, 1999; Johnston, 1995). The providers of airline services, like all service providers, need to implement effective complaint-management and service-recovery strategies to ensure (or at least enhance) consumer retention (Liu et al., 2000). However, there is lack of a reliable measurement tool to capture the impact of particular airline service-quality attributes and service-recovery actions on passengers’ behavioural intentions. The purposes of this study are, therefore: (i) to develop an integrated model of customer satisfaction and loyalty in the context of airline service failure; (ii) to undertake empirical testing of the position and effect of perceived value in such a model; (iii) to identify a set of pertinent service-quality dimensions for airline services; and (iv) to provide evidence for the causal relationships among the constructs of service quality, perceived value, overall customer satisfaction, and loyalty. The questionnaire contained items extracted from the existing literature on airline service quality (Park et al., 2004; Chen, 2008; Chen and Chang, 2005).

Modelling Ethicality in Consumption: Bridging the Literature on Ethics

In recent years, the western world has observed the growing popularity and gradual consolidation of the ethical consumers who express ethical concerns through consumption. Research efforts to model the ethical consumer mostly draw on attitude-intention models and ignore existing ethical decision making models in the business and consumer context. Also, a major issue in this field is the attitude-behaviour gap, where consumers claim to be ethically concerned, but do not behave accordingly. To overcome these issues, we propose a new model drawing from a number of models in the general field of ethics and marketing.

Enhancing Sales Force Performance the Impact of Learning and Leadership

The present paper provides the theoretical foundation of an exploratory study currently undertaken in France. Sales managers and salespeople from different industries are going to participate in dyads providing fruitful feedback concerning the relevant constructs discussed above. The focus of this study will be to demonstrate the impact of various antecedents on sale force performance. The importance of learning orientation is a central key issue influencing the formation of salesperson’s goal orientation and the quality of sales manager-salespeople relationships. The mediating role of the absorptive capacity construct is of particular interest as it seems to influence both learning orientation and sales force performance. We expect that research findings will support the mentioned hypothesis in a way that useful conclusions can be extracted concerning the mechanisms that affect trust building and goal commitment and the impact these important variables have on sales force performance. The present framework will be pre-tested by a number of interviews with both members of the dyad.

The Role of Service Quality Perceptions and Service Failure/Recovery Episodes in the Formation of B2B Loyalty: An Empirical Investigation in the Greek it Industry

The impact of service recovery strategies has attracted increasing research and practitioner interest in recent years. The majority of studies, however, have been conducted in a business to consumer setting, rather than in a business to business (B2B) setting, where customers tend to be more experienced with the service. This paper extends previous work by examining customer perceptions of service recovery in a business market (the Greek IT market), and models the effect of service quality and service recovery perceptions on overall satisfaction and on customers’ behavioural intentions, using key informants who have been involved directly in a service failure incident. Customer perceptions of reliability are found to be critical, with direct and indirect effects on service recovery satisfaction, overall satisfaction and customer loyalty. Service recovery perceptions are also found to have both a direct effect on behavioural intentions, and an indirect effect (via satisfaction).

Service Quality, Product Quality and Service Recovery as Antecedents of Client Satisfaction in a Business-to-Business Context: An Empirical Study

The advent of Relationship Marketing and the increasing competition characterizing the markets of the last 30 years placed the conceptualization and measurement of the quality and satisfaction variables in the center of modern marketing theory and practice as principal indicators of marketing performance (Babin and Griffin 1998; Walker 1995; Jones and Suh 2000). During the last years, we were pilot of an increasing process of globalization in the world. Thus, we see that the traditional definitions of markets and competition according to a regional or local prospect were exceeded. In addition, in reaction, to some extent, with this context much more competitive, the companies choose the development of products and services of the services of a higher quality, in response to the increasing requests of the increasingly demanding customers (Parasuraman, 1998).

Sales Managers’ Learning Orientation, Salespeople Goal Orientation and Overall Organizational Performance

In this study we develop and empirically test a conceptual model of sales management learning orientation, salespersons goal orientation and sales performance. Focusing on a Greek sales environment we explored the responses of 182 sales managers – salespeople dyads. Our findings demonstrate that learning orientation of sales managers does not directly impact organizational performance, but has a rather indirect effect on this construct through stimulating salespersons learning and performance orientation.