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The purpose of this paper is to explore situational influences on customers' actual choice between self‐service and personal service and to examine the impact of past experiences on self‐service technology (SST) attitudes and behavior.

A supermarket self‐checkout machine is the SST under investigation. A mixed qualitative research design was used and a total of 209 observations and 47 interviews were obtained from customers in five supermarket stores in Australia.

Perceived waiting time, perceived task complexity, and companion influence are the three situational factors that impact on a customer's actual choice between self‐service and personal service. Past experiences influence SST attitudes and behavior in a more complex manner than SST characteristics and other individual difference variables.

The findings may not be generalizable to internet‐ or telephone‐based SST contexts.

By understanding what factors affect a customer's choice, better strategies can be developed to manage and coordinate multiple service delivery options. The findings also highlight the importance of preventing frequent failure and providing speedy recovery in the SST context.

This paper goes beyond SST attitudes/intentions and focuses on the moderating effect of situational factors on a customer's actual SST behavior. It also examines the impact of focal product and product‐norm experiences on SST attitudes and behavior.

To date, empirical and conceptual models of relationship marketing have focused almost exclusively on a range of direct antecedents and mediator variables to explain variations in a dependent variable – usually relationship commitment. No attempt has been made to examine under what conditions these various antecedents have a stronger/weaker impact on relationship commitment. This paper extends the relationship marketing literature by testing a contingency model to assess the impact of trust and service satisfaction on relationship commitment under conditions of varying switching costs, alternative attractiveness and experience‐based norms, in the context of a professional consumer service. Employing a sample of 201 clients of financial planning services, we test 11 hypotheses formulated on the basis of a review of the services and relationship marketing literature, and a series of qualitative interviews with clients. The results clearly indicate that the impact of trust and satisfaction vary according to contingency conditions of switching costs, attractiveness of alternatives and client experience.

The symbolic value of wine is a relevant research topic and raises the interest in studies in both the enological and market areas. In this context, this study aims to understand the role of the symbolic value of wine and its relationship to the product purchase intention.

The study is based on a survey of 269 wine consumers from Brazil. The basic theoretical framework includes three latent constructs (symbolic value, consumer attitude and product-norm experience) and three moderators (consumer involvement, willingness to pay and consumer preference). Relations between these are analyzed using the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the moderated mediation analyses using Haye’s process.

This research identified that the symbolic value is totally mediated by consumers’ attitudes and product-norm experiences. However, such a relationship occurs directly for consumers with higher involvement with the product, higher willingness to pay, and who assume that wine is their preferred alcoholic beverage.

One of the contributions is to emphasize the symbolic value of wine and highlight how the relationship with different factors can interfere and explain consumer purchase intention and can influence the strategies, actions and investments of companies in the sector.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the dynamics of customer education by exploring the relationship between education and customer expertise and their combined effects on customer loyalty in a high involvement investment services context. The paper also considers the service context within which customer education initiatives are delivered. More specifically, it explores the moderating effects of increasing levels of customer expertise (the outcome of customer education) on the relative importance of technical service quality (what is delivered) and functional service quality (how it is delivered) in determining the loyalty decision. In doing so, the paper aims to provide implications for the investment service firm for managing the service offering as customers develop expertise over time.

The paper proposes a conceptual model that formalises the research objectives as a series of testable hypotheses. This is followed by an outline of the research design and method. The hypotheses are tested using a sample of 1,268 high value clients from a global investment services firm. An analysis of the model and the results is presented.

Customer loyalty was found to be positively and significantly related to technical service quality, functional service quality, and customer education. Contrary to expectations, however, customer expertise was not negatively related to customer loyalty. Customer education was found to be positively associated with customer expertise. The main effect of customer education on loyalty was significant; however it did not diminish when customer expertise was entered into the third equation. In other words, the conditions for partial mediation were not satisfied. Finally, the positive and significant interaction coefficient between technical service quality and expertise implied that the positive effect of technical service quality on consumer customer loyalty was indeed stronger when customer expertise was high. Conversely, and consistent with expectations, the interaction term between functional service quality and customer expertise was significant and negative, indicating that the positive relationship between functional service quality and customer loyalty is diminished as customer expertise increases.

Where there is a significant amount of research on customer knowledge and expertise, there is relatively less understanding of how customers acquire such knowledge. It is hoped that this paper can shed some additional light on the subject of customer education, its impact on customer expertise and, ultimately, on the way in which service quality is perceived.

Research in economics, finance and decision science has shown that consumers are familiar with unit‐to‐unit variability, and in the context of services it has been demonstrated that consumers often anticipate and perceive performance heterogeneity. However, satisfaction models to date have failed to explicitly treat expectations as distributions. In this study, expectations were modeled along two dimensions – mean and variance of expected performance – which were manipulated together with actual performance in a true experimental design. The findings indicate that the expected variance in performance had an impact on perceived disconfirmation. Specifically, at low levels of incongruity (i.e. small absolute performance deviations from the expected mean), a high expected variance in performance reduced the level of perceived disconfirmation. Conversely, at high levels of incongruity (large absolute performance deviations from expectations), the expected variance in performance exerted minimal influence over perceived disconfirmation. These findings are reconciled and discussed using the zones of indifference and tolerance, and assimilation processes.

The purpose of this paper is to look at the influence of switching barriers on patients' private general practitioner (GP) service expectations and tolerance zone

From 750 questionnaires distributed to a convenience sample, 257 were completed and returned, yielding a 34 per cent response rate.

There was a significant association between switching barriers and what patients expected from their GPs. Switching barriers did not have a significant association with the tolerance zone.

Private GPs can develop strategies to overcome switching barriers. For example, they can develop personal relationships with their patients, re‐familiarise themselves with the patient's medical history before the consultation and provide better services to patients who perceive high switching barriers and hence higher adequate expectations.

This study contributes to the existing literature relating to healthcare service quality.

This paper aims to re‐examine the commitment‐trust model in the context of premium banking services. In line with Toncar and Munch, the authors seek to develop an extension to the model because of the need to encapsulate contextual variables that constrain the link between the core relationship marketing constructs of trust and commitment.

A series of qualitative interviews were administered with bank relationship managers and premium banking customers. This enabled the concurrent consideration of both bank and customer views that helped to establish converging lines of thought within the bank‐customer relationship.

The authors’ findings provided evidence of the commitment‐trust link, and in particular continuance‐based commitment, within the context of premium banking relationships. By triangulating their findings with current thinking in relationship marketing literature, the authors present propositions for interaction quality and switching costs to be salient moderators between trust and commitment in this premium segment. A conceptual model that outlines the interplay between these four constructs is offered.

Few have examined the commitment‐trust link in light of moderator variables within retail banking services, and this research is the first to examine this specifically in the premium banking segment where customers are likely to be financially savvier and less knowledge dependent. This research therefore takes the first step in developing an extension to the commitment‐trust model for this segment, and forms the basis for further empirical research to examine the specific impact of interaction quality and switching costs, particularly in relation to continuance‐based commitment.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of perceived satisfaction with mobile payment applications based on use experience, and subsequent stated expectations on brand loyalty and future use behavior using a theory-based research integrative model of factors that influence Arabs’ intentions to use mobile payment application(s).

A conceptual model was developed using the mixed research method approach. The focus group approach was used for the qualitative study and structural equation modeling for the quantitative study. Primary data were collected online. Participants were 305 Arab consumers from nine countries in the Middle East.

Satisfaction with the quality of mobile payment application(s) increased use experience and enhanced consumers’ expectations, which in turn positively affected loyalty and purchase intentions.

The study encompassed mobile payment application(s) in nine countries rather than focusing on one market, or on one product type and business. The paper did not perform a comparative study between sampled Arab countries, but rather it sees all countries and respondents just as Arabs.

Service providers should build mobile application(s) based on the features of usability, availability, reliability, adaptability, accessibility, responsiveness and security.

This study is one of the first studies that empirically examines mobile payment consumer’s usage behavior from nine countries of the Arab world where there is scarce research on the topic in the region.