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Many studies have documented that satisfaction does not always result in loyalty, and that dissatisfaction does not necessarily result in defection. In response, this study goes beyond satisfaction and proposes the moderating effects of locational convenience, interpersonal relationships, and commitment between satisfaction and customer loyalty across search, experience, and credence attribute services.

Hierarchical moderated regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

The results suggest that from search attribute services to experience and credence attribute services, the relative importance of locational convenience with regard to retaining dissatisfied customers is likely to decline. Search and experience attribute services that can develop and maintain close interpersonal relationships with their customers are more likely to retain dissatisfied customers. Commitment maintains customer loyalty, even when customer satisfaction is lower across search, experience, and credence attribute services.

This study discriminates dissatisfied customers' loyalty behaviors based on locational convenience from those behaviors resulting from interpersonal relationships and commitment across service types, and thus has significance for the marketing strategies of businesses providing different service types, particularly in terms of dissatisfaction resolution strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how affective commitment to fellow customers influences a customer's affective commitment to the service provider and customer citizenship behavior (CCB). In addition, the paper seeks to examine the moderating role of a customer's calculative commitment to the service organization.

The study used a large-scale survey among customers of a health club and a scenario-based experiment to test the hypotheses.

Both empirical studies provide evidence that affective commitment to fellow customers has positive consequences for the customer-firm-relationship. The findings suggest that commitment to fellow customers and commitment to the service organization influence very specific facets of customer citizenship behavior. In addition, the study found preliminary support for the moderating role of calculative commitment. Affective commitment to fellow customers showed the strongest effect on affective commitment to the provider in customer-firm relationships characterized by high (versus low) calculative commitment.

The results of this research have a number of managerial implications. This study suggests measures to strengthen customer-firm-relationships, e.g. generating intensive exchange among customers or attraction of consumer pairs. Providing customers with platforms of valuable relationships to multiplex ties can be a competitive advantage for service providers.

This article is the first that highlights the role of other customers as a target of customer commitment and how this commitment affects both the customer's relationship to the service provider and his or her customer citizenship behavior. The present study therefore broadens our knowledge of how bonding among customers influences consumer behavior in service settings.

This study aims to provide a taxonomy of relational benefits that drive customer loyalty in sharing-economy services, assess the relative strengths of these relational benefits in influencing customer loyalty and examine whether commitment mediates the influence of relational benefits on customer loyalty in this context.

Relational benefits of sharing-economy services were explored through a focus group interview, followed by an online survey completed by 440 respondents in China. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

This study shows that confidence and social benefits have significant and positive effects on commitment in sharing-economy services. In addition, safety benefits, a new type of relational benefits, also significantly affect commitment in this context. Furthermore, the findings suggest that commitment acts as a mediator between confidence, social and safety benefits and customer loyalty. Special treatment benefits had no effect on commitment and loyalty in the sharing-economy context.

This paper provides sharing-economy service providers with insight on how to better create and sustain loyal relationships with customers through the provision of relational benefits.

This study offers initial insight into why customers would stay in peer-to-peer relationships in the sharing economy, and suggests how to strengthen relationships between customers and peer service providers.

This paper aims to examine the role of three forms of customer commitment (normative, affective, and continuance) on a variety of loyalty‐related customer responses.

Data were collected from two distinct sampling frames, which yielded a combined metrically invariant sample of 348 consumers. A three‐dimensional conceptualization of commitment is used to analyze impacts on one focal (i.e. repurchase intentions) and two discretionary customer responses.

Results of structural equation modeling analyses indicate that affective commitment is the primary driver of the customer responses and mediates the effects of normative and continuance commitments. These effects are contingent upon the type of service.

This research emphasizes the primacy of affective commitment in predicting loyalty‐like customer responses.

Managers need to focus primarily on generating affective commitment, but be mindful that normative and continuance commitment also play a role in generating desirable consumer responses.

The paper builds on and overcomes several deficiencies in prior commitment research. A more accurate and useful representation of affective, normative, and continuance commitment roles in generating focal and discretionary behaviors is provided.

Allen and Meyer’s (1990) three component model of organizational commitment is now well accepted in the study of consumer–service provider relationships (Keiningham et al., 2015). Commitment profiling is a “person-centered approach” to commitment (Meyer et al., 2012) which examines groups of individuals who share similar commitment mindsets. The purpose of this paper is to apply commitment profile methodology to the analysis of customer–firm relationships in the context of financial services.

This method was applied with customer data collected as part of a nation-wide panel study of consumer financial service relationships in Canada. In total, 428 banking customers participated in this study.

This study identified five distinct bank customer commitment profiles (fully committed, affective commitment dominant, continuance commitment dominant, moderately committed and uncommitted) that varied in both size and behaviors and intentions.

This is an exploration of commitment profiling as a technique to understand the ways in which consumers differ in terms of their commitment mindsets and behavior. It has application to a wide range of service relationships beyond financial services.

This has applications for market segmentation on the basis of customer commitment mindsets in many service sectors, but banking in particular. Since financial institutions have adopted various techniques to measure customer lifetime value (CLV), it would be appropriate to understand how various commitment profiles (segments) are linked to CLV.

While commitment profiling is a well-developed approach in understanding the nature of the firm–employee employment relationships, this is an early and exploratory attempt at applying this method in the context of a customer–financial service provider marketing relationship. This is a novel way of understanding bank customer segments in terms of their felt commitment to the financial institution with which they do business.

The relationship marketing literature puts forward that customer commitment is central to the development of marketing relationships. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which two components of customer commitment (affective commitment and continuance commitment) both enhance and undermine customer loyalty.

A theoretical model was developed to determine the extent to which the components of commitment both served as mediators of and interacted with one another in the relationship between service quality and switching and advocacy intentions. This model was examined in a survey of customers in three service settings; financial services, retail‐grocery services and telecommunications services.

Commitment serves as a partial mediator of the service quality‐loyalty relationship. It was also found that affective commitment made a negative impact on switching intentions and a positive impact on advocacy intentions in all three service settings. Continuance commitment had mixed effects on switching intentions and made a negative impact on advocacy intentions.. At the same time there was an interactive effect between the two components of commitment such that continuance commitment depressed the positive effects of affective commitment on both dependent variables.

While the positive impact of identification based affective commitment is well understood in the marketing literature, the role of continuance commitment is not so well appreciated. This study reinforces the weakness of a relationship based on continuance commitment. In addition, few studies prior to this one have demonstrated the interactive effects between the two components of commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the service behaviours of highly committed consultants engaged in face‐to‐face service provision with customers in the financial‐services industry.

In‐depth interviews are conducted with 41 financial consultants (from 30 financial‐service firms) in Austria. The qualitative data are then rigorously analysed and coded to identify categories of behaviours of highly committed financial consultants.

In total, 15 behaviours of highly committed financial consultants are identified. These behaviours are shown to include both “in‐role” behaviours and “extra‐role” behaviours. The study also finds that service behaviours of highly committed financial consultants change over time. Employed and self‐employed financial consultants are found to have the same high‐commitment behaviours; however, employed consultants tend to experience conflicts between organisational commitment and customer commitment, whereas self‐employed consultants tend to experience conflicts between their own self interests and the interests of their customers.

The study did not examine whether age and experience influence behavioural differences. Nor did the study address the question of behaviours that are typical of low‐commitment service delivery. Future research could objectively record the behaviours (by audio‐recording and/or video‐recording) to reduce the possibility of self‐serving bias by respondents in reporting their behaviours.

The study provides guidance for managers who wish to encourage and reward highly committed service behaviours among employees.

Little research has been conducted into the actual behaviours of financial consultants while delivering services. Moreover, previous studies of organisational commitment have utilised quantitative methodologies to assess attitudes, whereas this study adopts a qualitative approach and examines actual behaviours of high work commitment.

Relationship marketing (RM) has been widely accepted as an important determinant of long‐term business success and is believed to be especially well suited for services because of the personal contact between customers and service providers. Past research has focused mainly on the advantages of RM for companies, while less attention has been paid to relationships from the customer’s point of view. We suggest that relationships may be described as ranging from spurious to true, depending on customer‐perceived relationship benefits, trust and commitment. A qualitative study of customer relationships was conducted in a car dealership, where profitability depends on customer commitment to both after‐sales services and the car brand. Customer relationships were found to be more spurious than true. The study revealed that behavioural commitment to after‐sales services was high, but that affective commitment was low to moderate. Customers were satisfied but did not perceive the services to be superior to the competitors’ service offerings. They trusted authorised repair in general and did not feel that after‐sales service would have more than a minor influence on their future car purchases.

Limited attention has been given to the effects of normative commitment (NC) in a marketing relationship. This paper investigates the effects of service quality and normative commitment on customer retention in a consumer-retailer relationship.

Two distinct studies; a longitudinal experiment and a SEM model were conducted to tease out the normative commitment-service quality interaction on customer switching intentions in services.

Both studies supported the existence of a significant normative commitment-service quality interaction on switching, in addition to the main effects of both variables.

The longitudinal experiment has the limitation of being a simple test of theory in a controlled setting. Study II validates this theory in a real-world retail services setting, but there are questions about the extent to which the relationship may hold in other service sectors. The results indicate that the effect of service quality on customer loyalty is moderated by normative commitment. This may also allow us to think about customer commitment in a new way in that it could be a construct rooted in attitude confidence rather than attitude.

The findings allow practitioners to recognize that the development of obligation-based normative commitment can give them a basis for successful competition against other firms, even those that may outperform them on other salient attributes, including basic service quality.

This is one of a very small number of studies in the discipline that have examined the effects of normative commitment and the first that has demonstrated that normative commitment moderates the service quality-service customer retention relationship. This opens the door for the possibility that other forms of commitment may moderate the relationship between service quality and customer retention.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual model for smartphone brand switching behavior, based on the consumption value theory (functional value, emotional value, social value and epistemic value) and the cognition affect behavior (CAB) model. Two paths – product consumption values and retail service relational benefits – were considered as the cognitive elements to predict brand commitment (affect) and smartphone brand switching behavior. In addition, switching cost was used to measure the moderating effect on the relationship between brand commitment and smartphone brand switching behavior.

This research examined whether product consumption value and cognitive benefits related to retail services will enhance brand commitment and then further decrease smartphone brand switching behavior. Switching cost was predicted as a moderator in the model. An investigation of consumers who own a particular brand of smartphone (e.g. the top five smartphone brands: Samsung, Apple, HTC, Sony and Asus) was conducted, and 565 valid responses were collected for the structural equation modeling analysis.

The results demonstrated that emotional value, social value, epistemic value and confidence benefits increased consumer brand commitment and predicted less smartphone brand switching behavior. In addition, switching cost played a significant moderator role in the relationship between brand commitment and brand switching behavior.

A multiple cognitive paths design, with a consumption values aspect and a relational benefits aspect, can elaborate consumer perceptions of product values and service benefits simultaneously, which can lead to a better understanding of the whole picture of the brand services and the key reasons why consumers commit to a brand. Administrators of brand vendors are suggested to improve product innovation and the professionalism of sales services in order to facilitate consumer consumption values, increase their degree of confidence in members of sales staff and, in the meantime, help these administrators gain an understanding of the real reasons for brand switching so as to provide solutions leading to the maintenance of consumer brand commitment through products or services. This is, in turn, likely to increase continued usage intention and reduce the possibility of brand switching.

This study extended the consumption value theory and the CAB model to show that product consumption value and cognitive benefits related to retail services can enhance brand commitment and further decrease smartphone brand switching behavior. The results indicated that brand retailer managers should regularly conduct activities to connect with their customers to induce consumption values and relational benefits and, consequently, increase brand commitment and prevent customer switching behavior.