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This study aims to explore how business-to-business service failures manifest in a manufacturing context.

The empirical research involved two case studies: case study one included 20 interviews in the metal finishing industry; case study two included 20 interviews in the paint and coatings industry. In both case studies, suppliers and customers’ perceptions were obtained to facilitate a dyadic understanding of the phenomena.

Business-to-business service failure is a complex, dynamic and interactive process. It varies according to type of service, services supporting the products and services supporting the customers, service quality dimensions and the source of the failure. It can have a more profound impact than service failure in a consumer context because it may cause disruption to customers’ production and have a negative influence of failure on their clients in the network.

Business customers may play a role in value co-destruction rather than value co-creation by causing service failures due to errors on their part. The consequences of the domino effects revealed in this study need to be given careful consideration by managers. The research is exploratory, and the findings may be influenced by the manufacturing sector in which the case study firms are based.

Business-to-business service failure has its own distinct characteristics, as it may impact widely in the business-to-business network. Domino effects implicitly dominate business-to-business service failure episodes where negative outcomes cascade downstream and affect service recipients’ customers.

Develops a model of the service delivery process in the business‐to‐business context which extends the well‐known Gaps Model and accounts for major differences between the provider/consumer model and business‐to‐business relationships. Describes ongoing efforts to measure service quality in different business‐to‐business settings and contrasts them with the SERVQUAL approach. Also describes a new approach for creating business‐to‐business relationships as well as implications for managers given the task of creating a competitive advantage through a service quality initiative.

Current marketing theory and practice have recognized that exchanges between buyers and sellers are frequently embedded in social relationships. Despite the vast body of research on interorganizational exchange, there has been little effort to address the role of larger social networks in which business‐to‐business services firms operate. This paper seeks to present a model of how social network theory can help in understanding why some services firms manage to reinvent themselves and continue to succeed in a business‐to‐business environment, while others are slow to change and decline.

Drawing on 81 in‐depth interviews conducted with general managers/chief executive officers operating in information technology, and biotechnology business‐to‐business services contexts, we consider the relative importance of both network strength and network openness in driving business performance.

The authors identify both network strength between firms and openness towards new actors as underpinning competitive advantage in business‐to‐business services.

Data were collected for service firms operating in two different industries in two regions. The paper underscores the importance of examining the network properties that connect exchange partners when discussing firm performance in business‐to‐business service contexts.

The paper makes a series of important contributions to the small, but growing literature on services networks and has direct implications for managers.

This paper aims to examine the impact of service encounter quality within a service evaluation model. The conceptual model seeks to incorporate the following constructs: service encounter quality, service quality, customer satisfaction, perceived value, loyalty to the firm and loyalty to the employees.

A conceptual model was developed based on a comprehensive literature review. A questionnaire was developed with item measures that captures the constructs in the conceptual model. A survey of business customers was undertaken, and a response rate of 18.6 per cent was obtained. The data are analysed via confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling.

Service encounter quality is directly related to customer satisfaction and service quality perceptions, and indirectly to perceived value and loyalty. The paper offers insights into the specifics of business‐to‐business service dynamics by examining the role of service quality, satisfaction, value on loyalty to both employees of the firm and the firm itself. It demonstrates how firms may be able to contribute to the achievement of organisational objectives through careful and creative management of the service encounter.

Research examining the role that service encounter quality plays within service evaluation models is scarce. Moreover, most service evaluation models are operationalised within a retail customer context. The paper addresses both these shortcomings, by examining a comprehensive service evaluation model which incorporates service encounter quality within a business‐to‐business context.

Reaching customer satisfaction and brand loyalty in a business-to-business setting is still an area of rising interest to both researchers and practitioners. Compared to consumer branding, there is notably very little known about the success factors of industrial branding and how to convince buyers rationally and emotionally in business-to-business markets. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the success factors of branding in a business-to-business setting and analyze their performance impact on customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

In total, 258 buyers of mechanical and plant engineering companies participated in an online survey. Data analysis was performed by using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that rational brand quality consists of the three dimensions, product quality, service quality and distribution quality, whereas consistent advertising style, brand image, country-of-manufacture image and salesperson’s personality are dimensions of emotional brand associations. All dimensions positively influence customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

This study offers a certain value compared to the relevant literature mentioned in literature review. Compared to a large majority of the papers, the integration of rational and emotional factors in an integrative and complex model implies novelty. For example, Davis et al. (2008) and Baumgarth and Binckebanck (2011) focus on specific exogenous factors in their studies, namely, brand awareness and brand image, respectively, sales force impact combined with product quality and non-personal communication. In contrast, Van Riel, Pahud de Mortanges and Streukens (2005), Chen et al. (2011) and Chen and Su (2012) conceptualized a more complex model but did not separate rational and emotional factors. Jensen and Klastrup (2008) were the only authors who made this separation, but they did not include well-known emotional success factors such as brand image or country-of-manufacture image in their research model. Furthermore, an endogenous causal chain representing an observable consumer behavior is missing. This paper fills this gap.

Drawing on insights from the extant service‐quality literature (which is dominated by an end‐consumer focus), this paper examines customer service in business‐to‐business markets. It first presents a typology of seller‐customer links and discusses the domain of customer service in business‐to‐business contexts. It then develops a research agenda by identifying a variety of issues pertaining to the scope, measurement, and potential impact of customer service in such contexts. It is hoped that this agenda will stimulate further discussion on the role of customer service in business and industrial marketing, and motivate much‐needed research on this topic.

In practice, firms measure customer satisfaction using models and theory developed for evaluating the perceptions of individual consumers rather than entire organizations. This paper develops an integrated model of customer satisfaction measurement specific to a business‐to‐business context and addresses the unique challenges inherent in this context by incorporating learnings from the fields of customer satisfaction, organizational buying behavior and relationship marketing. After presenting the model and its rationale, the paper illustrates practical uses of the model as a managerial tool for framing a system of customer satisfaction measurement.

For successful servitization, manufacturing firms must understand how their customers adopt new services. The purpose of this paper is to explore customers’ readiness for a manufacturer’s new services to complement its goods. The goal is to increase knowledge of the aspects that manufacturers should consider when bringing new kinds of services to market.

A qualitative case study design is used to analyze readiness for services and interest in service adoption in three customer firms of a manufacturer. The interview data were collected from 14 persons at customer sites and were content analyzed.

The results show that readiness – a concept that is often used in the field of technology – is relevant also for the service adoption process. In a business-to-business context, readiness for service adoption concerns the individual and organizational levels, and hence a new dimension of organizational culture and habits had to be added to the concept that originally focuses on individuals. People consider different factors when making consecutive decisions during the service adoption process and these factors can vary even within a company. The cornerstone for new service adoption is the customer firm’s actual need for the service.

The results offer new knowledge about service adoption in a business-to-business context by taking a customer firm’s perspective. They, thus, complement previous studies on the supplier perspective of servitization and service adoption in consumer business. The contributions help manufacturers focus their efforts when bringing new services to market.

Addresses the value definition and conceptualization issues in a business‐to‐business professional services context. Finds that results of exploratory research reveal that providers and organizational customers do not perceive value as a static concept; rather, the value definition comprises a time aspect and is associated with the exchange value during the transaction itself and value in use after the transaction. Discovers that value exchange is made up of a set of quality and relational criteria, whereas value in use refers to financial, social, operational and strategic performance and furthermore, perceptual differences may be explained by the presence of causal ambiguity which refers to differences in competency level between providers and customers, between hierarchical levels and professional services.

The relationship marketing paradigm has emerged as a major tool by which marketers may examine and conceptualise relationships with consumers, however its application to the business‐to‐business dimension of retailing has been largely neglected. The current work examines one particular aspect of business‐to‐business marketing: the franchisor‐franchisee relationship in the context of international fashion retailing. This relationship is examined in the light of the relationship marketing literature, with particular reference to the relevance of the marriage analogy. Employing a case study approach, this paper considers international fashion retailers' response to the need to develop business‐to‐business relationships in international markets via the franchising mode of market entry. The paper concludes that the marriage analogy is useful in the context of franchise relationships if properly defined by core and intended relationship benefits.