Sandy Ng

Generating positive word‐of‐mouth in the service experience

Purpose – This paper seeks to investigate the effects of relationship benefits on relationship quality and aspects of service quality, namely technical and functional quality, and the subsequent influence on word‐of‐mouth behavior.Design/methodology/approach – The paper reports results from a structural equation model that utilizes data from 591 consumers across a range of services.Findings – The findings highlight the important role of relationship benefits in driving customer perceptions of technical, functional and relationship quality. While confidence, social and special treatment benefits drive technical and functional quality, it is only confidence benefits that drive relationship quality. Furthermore, it is found that functional and relationship quality drive word‐of‐mouth behavior.Research limitations/implications – The findings of this study contribute to the literature by showing the differential impact that relationship benefits have on quality – technical, functional, and relationship – and s...

Do relationship benefits and maintenance drive commitment and loyalty

Purpose: This paper seeks to examine the central role that commitment plays in driving customer loyalty and to identify the effect that confidence, social and special treatment benefits as well as relationship investment, communication and management have on the development of commitment, and ultimately customer loyalty. Design/methodology/approach: The paper reports the results of a national mail survey of 591 consumers across nine different service industries. Findings: The findings of the study suggest that relationship commitment drives customer loyalty and that confidence, social and special treatment benefits affect commitment to the service, as does relationship investment and management. Surprisingly, relationship communication was found to have a negative effect on commitment to the service. Practical implications: This paper provides managers with insight as to how they can better create and sustain loyal relationships through the creation of customer commitment. Originality/value: The paper empirically demonstrates the importance of commitment in developing and sustaining loyal relationships while also providing a detailed assessment of the role of relationship benefits and maintenance in creating committed customers.

The Role of Affect in Consumer Evaluation of Health Care Services

Health care services are typically consumed out of necessity, typically to recover from illness. While the consumption of health care services can be emotional given that consumers experience fear, hope, relief, and joy, surprisingly, there is little research on the role of consumer affect in health care consumption. We propose that consumer affect is a heuristic cue that drives evaluation of health care services. Drawing from cognitive appraisal theory and affect-as-information theory, this article tests a research model (N = 492) that investigates consumer affect resulting from service performance on subsequent service outcomes.

Antecedents and consequences of customer-service provider relationship strength

Strong relationships are crucial to service industries as it reduces customer churn. This paper investigates the impact of relationship antecedents on relationship strength and its subsequent influence on attitudinal loyalty and share of wallet. Results from a structural equation model that utilises data from 591 consumers across nine different service types show confidence and social benefits, frequency, duration and relationship investment (driven by management and communication efforts) enhance relationship strength. Relationship strength drives attitudinal loyalty and share of wallet, with attitudinal loyalty mediating the relationship between relationship strength and share of wallet. This study investigates the factors that drive strong relationships and the importance of attitudinal loyalty as it mediates the relationship between relationship strength and share of wallet. This is the first study to simultaneously examine relationship benefits, investment and the frequency and duration of a relationship impact on relationship strength; and its subsequent influence on attitudinal and behavioural outcomes, in various service industries.

Examining Customer Perceptions of Relationship Quality Over Time

Relationship quality is important as it is a strong indicator of long-term relationships (Bejou, Wray and Ingram 1996; Crosby, Evans and Cowles 1990), and an important driver for loyalty and profitability (Athanasopoulou 2009). Customer’s perceptions of the quality of the relationship they have with their service providers are built over time. Yet, researches often examine customer’s perceptions of relationship quality statically. This prevents the meaningful understanding of how customers form their perceptions of relationship quality and subsequent outcomes. Prior research has revealed little about the variation in the salience of service quality – technical and functional quality, relationship management and relational switching costs between novice and experienced customers in terms of contribution to relationship quality perceptions and subsequent loyalty. This study examines these issues using AMOS multi-group analyses across experiential services such as a travel agency, hairdressing salon, general banking and airline services. Results indicate that technical and functional quality and switching costs differs across novice and experienced customer groups. Specifically, the impact of technical quality on relationship quality perceptions was significantly more in the experienced group and the impact of functional quality and switching costs was found to be a significant driver of relationship quality for the experienced group only. The impact of relationship management on relationship quality and the effect of relationship quality on loyalty are both significant and were found to be relatively consistent across both groups. These findings have implications for managing relationship quality perceptions, improving service provider performance and enhancing customer relations.

A Conceptual Model of Service Providers’ Psychological Resilience at the Workplace

This project answers a recent call from the Transformative Service Research (TSR) movement (Anderson et al. 2013) to address a lack of research in understanding the well-being of service providers. In addition, this research also addresses a pressing issue to counteract management problems such as increase turnover rate (Bardoel et al. 2014), which is prevalent in certain service industries such as the hospitality and the retail sectors. Service providers, being boundary spanners, often experience emotional stressors due to conflicting job roles and demands from both internal (within the organisation) and external (e.g., customers) environments (e.g., Lings et al. 2010). This leads to burnout, which creates a psychological strain on service providers that can have serious detrimental consequences for the psychological well-being of employees. Positive psychology literature found that positive emotions serve as markers of flourishing, or optimal well-being (Fredrickson 2001). In an ideal scenario, management would want service employees to be happy and well at all times. However, this is unrealistic. To this end, this research proposes a conceptual model that studies the role of psychological resilience in buffering and regulating service employee’s well-being.

Persuasive Design of Wellness Apps: Consumer Behavior Perspective

Leveraging on the ubiquitous nature of smartphones, wellness apps are developed to disseminate health message and persuade people to adopt healthier lifestyle and behavior. There are many wellness apps in the market—with more than 97,000 health-related apps listed on 62 full catalogue app stores (research2guidance 2013) and the projected revenue to reach

Service experience: affect formation and evaluation

26 billion (mobihealthnews 2013). Although the number of wellness apps continues to increase, the download rates remain low at 10 % and a high dropout rate of around 74 % (iHealthBeat 2012). These statistics call into question an important problem—the interface of most wellness apps is poorly designed. Evidenced-based studies on app effectiveness remain scant and inconclusive (Kumar et al. 2013; McCurdie et al. 2012). Wellness apps need to be effective to assist individuals in making good health decisions (Royne and Levy 2011).