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Service relationships are often complex, involving multi‐level relationships. Customers can have relationships with the firm and interpersonal relationships with service personnel that vary in terms of strength and intensity. A study was designed to examine the relationship between perceived risk and type of service relationship. It also examined outcomes differences between different types of service relationships. The results suggest that consumers who have strong interpersonal relationships have the highest perceptions of category risk and the lowest perceptions of specific provider risk. The results also indicate that outcomes vary across different types of relationships. Customers who have strong interpersonal or strong person‐to‐firm relationships are less interested in alternatives, but only customers with strong interpersonal relationships are more dedicated, evidenced by greater cooperation, enhancement, identity, and advocacy.

Prior hospitality studies have reviewed review trustworthiness and perceived price as predictors of restaurant selection. However, the impacts of these two factors may vary by sales promotion and customer types. This study aims to determine whether sales promotions and customer type are the key elements that facilitate behavioral intentions by moderating the linkage between perceived price and behavioral intentions as well as the linkage between online review trustworthiness and behavioral intentions.

Analysis of the responses of 533 individuals familiar with the Michelin Guide for restaurants in Seoul provided evidence supporting a sales promotion theory wherein promotions signal benefits in consumers’ minds.

The findings show that when perceived price is positive and the trustworthiness of online reviews is high, repeat customers prefer mixed coupons to price discounts. Notably, the results indicate that when the trustworthiness of online reviews is high, first-time customers also prefer mixed coupons to price discounts. Furthermore, the findings suggest that negative evaluations of perceived price increase the impact of mixed coupons by signaling to first-time customers that given restaurants’ offerings provide monetary benefits regardless of their intentions to revisit said restaurants.

The study findings provide insights that should help managers better understand various levels of promotion. Managers can design their pricing strategies to strengthen customers’ motivations to visit their restaurants – the very thing customers often seek in sales promotions.

This study provides indisputable evidence for a sales promotion theory, wherein promotions signal benefits in consumers’ minds; however, it also shows that first-time and repeat customers do not respond equally to sales promotions.

Notes that the premiss of all efforts to achieve customer satisfaction is the basic assumption that customer satisfaction leads to customer loyalty. Although this thesis sounds reasonable, empirical studies indicate that satisfaction often is only a weak indicator of customer loyalty. This can partly be explained by shortcomings in satisfaction measurement. In applying unidimensional rating scales, it is assumed that customers who give the same satisfaction score also experience the same emotions, cognitions and intentions. This assumption is questionable, for satisfaction also has a qualitative dimension. Presents a qualitative satisfaction model, which results in five different qualitative satisfaction types with different patterns of emotions, cognitions and intentions. Results from an empirical study suggest that these satisfaction types imply different levels of the risk that even satisfied customers terminate a business relationship and switch to competitors.

This paper aims to examine how a firm’s customer concentration, which is the amount of sales between a supplier firm and the major customers, affects corporate bond contracts. This study also investigates how the types of customer concentration have a significant impact on bond contracts.

The research uses the Compustat’s segment customer database and the Mergent fixed income securities database, which provides details about publicly offered US bond issues and issuers. The sample also includes the US Congressional committees’ data from the 96th to 115th congresses. To control any endogenous concerns, the author uses changes in the seniority of US senators on powerful committees and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) as exogenous shocks. For a robustness test, the author also uses the propensity score-matched pairs.

While higher customer concentration, on average, leads to higher yield spreads and strict covenants, firms that have the US Government as a major customer pay lower yield spreads and have higher issue ratings. However, as a firm’s sales depend too heavily on the US Government customer channel, the bond issuance is likely to have lower issue ratings. The main findings also show that firms with government concentrations take advantage of political links, leading to lower yield spreads after two exogenous events.

The findings in this paper show the importance of a firm’s customer types in bond markets by emphasizing the positive impact of the US Government as the sales channel. Exogenous event studies based on the propensity-matched sample alleviate the endogenous concerns.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the particularities of the time consumption of transactions performed in an insurance firm and the prospective impact on costing.

This paper uses the results of an archival study conducted on data collected in an insurance firm.

The results suggest that the reasons underlying the heterogeneity of transactions’ time consumption are multiple and rule out a systematic and unique explanation. They lend support to the importance of the “human effect” in explaining the time consumption of service transactions and support the need for more research into the evolution of marketing thought that subordinates the concept of transaction to the concept of relationship. In addition, our results not only suggest that the drivers of time consumption and their importance are contingent on the type of service activity performed within the same firm, but also that inside a generic service activity, deviations in time consumption remain due to the provision of specific services.

Services have their own characteristics which make it difficult to trace their resource consumption. Yet limited research has focused on examining the impact of services’ characteristics on predicting costs. Our findings contribute to our understanding of such impact and cast doubt on the possibility of obtaining accurate costs for very detailed transactions for an acceptable cost-benefit trade-off.

This study aims to investigate if, when, and how the use of four different types of explanations affect customer satisfaction after a service failure.

The study used written scenarios of a hypothetical service failure to manipulate explanation type, failure magnitude and compensation offered. Participants were randomly assigned to read and respond to one version of the scenario, whilst imagining they were the customer experiencing the service failure.

The paper finds that explanation type, explanation quality, failure magnitude and compensation each had significant effects on customer evaluations. Explanation type and explanation quality interactively affected the extent to which customers were satisfied with service recovery: Apologies and excuses yielded higher satisfaction levels than did justifications and referential accounts but only when the explanations were perceived to be of high (vs low) quality. Specific types of attributions and forms of justice were shown to mediate the effects of three of the explanation types.

The study shows that customer evaluations following service failure vary with the type of explanation provided. Service firms need to provide an explanation in such circumstances, preferably a high quality excuse or apology, and need to understand the “process variables” that determine whether the explanation will satisfy aggrieved customers.

This is one of very few studies that have compared the efficacy of different types of explanations in service situations. The research sheds light not only on what types of explanations work best, but also on how they have their effect.

The purpose of this study is to propose long‐term orientation as a moderating effect on restaurant customer reward programs. Unlike in short‐term oriented and transactional marketing, long‐term orientation is an important factor in creating new loyal customers.

This research shows how the moderating effect of long‐term orientation affects customer reaction to reward timing (Experiment 1) and reward type (Experiment 2). The independent variables of Experiment 1 were timing of rewards (immediate/accumulate) and long‐term orientation (high/low), with the dependent variable being customer loyalty. The independent variables of Experiment 2 were the types of rewards (monetary/nonmonetary) and long‐term orientation (high/low), with the dependent variable being customer loyalty. The treatment groups are different from each other with regard to reward type and reward timing.

Depending on the reward type and its timing, long‐term orientation has a moderating effect on customer loyalty. In customers with a high long‐term orientation, there is no difference in the effect of rewards, whether they are immediate or accumulated and monetary or nonmonetary. On the other hand, for customers with a low long‐term orientation, the effect of rewards increases for monetary rewards more than nonmonetary ones and for immediate rewards more than for accumulated ones.

This paper helps restaurant managers to better understand customer loyalty and the value of reward programs that take into account the long‐term orientation concept.

Relationship marketing scholars and managers have recognized the potential of customer engagement to enhance business performance and customer value. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects that different types of customer engagement behaviors have on their perceived benefits.

The authors conducted two empirical studies. In the first step, 69 in-depth interviews were held to identify important customer engagement behaviors and targeted benefits. Then, in the second step, a quantitative study with 255 participants was used to match the identified customer engagement behaviors with the targeted benefits.

The results reveal that there are three aggregated types of customer engagement behaviors (“value creation-focused customer engagement”, “online-focused customer engagement” and “customer-to-customer interaction-focused customer engagement”). These types of customer engagement behaviors lead to different targeted benefits (social, relationship, autonomous, economic, altruistic and self-fulfillment benefits).

A consideration of the influencing factors of the different customer-engagement-behavior types, including customers’ motives for their engagement with a company, would potentially enhance the findings. Furthermore, a closer investigation of the relationship between socio-demographic characteristics and customer engagement types can also provide deeper insights into the reasons for engaging with a certain firm or brand.

The findings provide managers with information on how to segment customers according to their customer engagement type and associated benefits and thereby enable them to manage customer engagement behaviors more profitably.

The results make a key contribution to the emerging research field of customer engagement by gaining deeper insights into the benefits associated with different customer engagement behaviors. It becomes clear that different customer engagement types aim at receiving various benefits.

The influences of personality type and mood on customer evaluations such as service quality and satisfaction are not yet explored in the tourism and travel literature. Hence, this study aims to: (1) identify the role of personality and mood in customer service quality perceptions and overall satisfaction; and (2) assess these variables’ impact on service quality perception–overall satisfaction relationship.

To achieve the study’s objectives, firstly, 383 data were collected from German tourists staying in a five-star hotel in Antalya, Turkey. Then, the survey participants were clustered into four groups according to their personality types (A vs B) and mood (bad vs good).

Service quality perceptions and overall satisfaction of the participants were shown to vary according to their personality types and moods. In addition, the results indicated that personality type and mood might change the effect of perceived service quality on overall satisfaction.

As the survey sample is limited to German tourists staying in a five-star hotel in Antalya, Turkey, the study findings should be carefully generalised to other nationalities and service settings.

For service enterprises, it is important to understand how the psychological characteristics of the customers affect the perception of the services they offer. Therefore, the customer mood and personality traits, as well as their impacts on perceived service quality, have received wide coverage in the literature. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to investigate the interrelationships of mood, personality, service quality perception and overall satisfaction in the hospitality context.