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The purpose of this paper is to explore the mediation impacts of core, relational and tangible service-quality features on the relationship between customer–frontline employee rapport and customer dependency in an emerging market context. The study examines the moderating effects of relationship age and frequency of customers’ physical visits.

Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling was used to analyse data from a survey of 290 financial services customers in Dhaka, Bangladesh using the convenience sampling technique.

Results show that relational service-quality features had the largest mediation impact on the rapport–dependency relationship, followed by core and tangible service-quality features. Relationship age was not found to be a significant moderator for any relationship. However, the moderation effect of the frequency of customers’ physical visits to the service premises was significant, but only for the link between relational service-quality features and customer dependency and not for the other two types of service-quality features.

Data collected from several other emerging markets would provide more rigorous findings: this is recommended as an avenue for further research.

Practitioners can manipulate specific relational or tangible service-quality features to increase customer dependency on their firms, thus ensuring longer-term customer retention.

This study is the first one to examine the relative significance of the impacts of relational features vs tangible features of services on customer dependency in the emerging market context, with rapport serving as an antecedent.

This study aims to capture the mediation role of customer–frontline employee rapport on customer satisfaction and affective, calculative and normative commitment by using three alternative models. It also verifies the moderation effect of relationship age on the rapport-satisfaction link in each alternative model.

The survey data collected from bank customers were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with the partial least square (PLS) method.

Results confirmed rapport as a significant mediator between satisfaction and each of the three types of commitment. Relationship age significantly moderates the links between rapport to affective and normative commitment but not to calculative commitment.

Additional findings from “importance–performance analysis” suggest that satisfaction is more import to customers than rapport for developing commitment, so further investigations can reveal the underlying reasons. Also, complementary mediation shows one or more missing mediators, which calls for future research.

Managers need to use rapport strategically with customers in different relationship ages to build different types of commitment. Specific tactics to build rapport and possible long run implications for developing affective, calculative and normative commitment have been discussed in the “note to practitioner” section.

Using “broaden-and-build” theory, the study extends the literature by confirming the mediation influence of rapport on satisfaction and three types of commitment relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a method to evaluate the quality of service delivery process designs, based on how closely they meet process requirements of key stakeholders while taking variability into account.

A Monte Carlo computer simulation of the flowchart of the service delivery process is used to capture the effects of multiple types of variabilities and parametric uncertainties on process variables of interest, and the Taguchi quality loss framework is applied to estimate overall process quality. As an example, a proposed modification to a patient‐treatment process in a hospital emergency department is evaluated.

This paper demonstrated a method that service managers can use to evaluate the quality of service delivery process designs.

This method can evaluate modifications to various aspects of a service delivery process, and can assist managers to fail‐safe the entire process. Furthermore, it characterises process quality using a range of probable values instead of a single value, such as the process mean, and thus provides a more realistic representation of quality.

This paper contributes to service engineering in two ways: by adapting the Taguchi quality loss approach, commonly used to assess manufacturing process quality, to a service delivery process; and by incorporating uncertainty, due to imprecise knowledge of process parameters, into the quality assessment.

Considering the significance of customer satisfaction and commitment in the competitive banking industry of developing countries, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the alternative relationships of satisfaction with various types of commitment, benefits, quality and trust. It also attempts to identify the interrelationships among three types of trust, namely, competence, contractual and goodwill, as well as affective, calculative and normative commitment.

Structural equation modelling (AMOS-based) is used to analyse data collected from a survey of 212 bank customers in Bangladesh.

Findings show that satisfaction has a significant impact on affective, calculative and normative commitment, as well as on competence, contractual and goodwill trust. While core and relational service qualities, and confidence and social benefits influence the level of satisfaction, tangible service quality and special treatment benefit seem to have no significant effect on satisfaction. Finally, all three types of trust are found to have a strong influence on affective commitment; however, contractual trust and competence trust are found to have no impact on calculative and normative commitment.

The paper provides insights for bank management in order to understand the relative importance of each type of trust, commitment, quality and benefit, and their relationships with satisfaction.

It is the first to take the initiative to test a large range of relationships in a single study to better understand customer satisfaction in the banking industry in a developing country context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of calculative, affective and normative commitment on bank employee-customer rapport and customer satisfaction. The mediating effect of rapport between each of the three types of commitment and customer satisfaction is also examined.

Structural equation modelling by Partial Least Square method is used for analysing the data on 212 bank customers in Bangladesh.

Results indicate that affective and normative commitment of customers has strong influence in developing rapport, whereas the impact of customers’ calculative commitment on rapport was found to be non-significant. The study also found that rapport has a complementary mediation effect between the three types of commitment and customer satisfaction.

While providing training to front line employees, bank management should make them aware that not all customers may have the same level of positive attitude or cooperation for the rapport-building procedure. Employees should understand that different customers will respond differently to their efforts for building rapport due to their pre-existing commitment levels towards banks. Bank management should acknowledge that customers’ current level of commitment may be further strengthened or weakened by successful or unsuccessful rapport building with banks’ employees and thereby re-evaluate their satisfaction level with the bank.

The study contributes to the relationship literature by exploring the mediating role of rapport between commitment and customer satisfaction, and by considering the influence of normative commitment on customer-employee rapport in financial services.

This study aims to explore the opportunity offered through mobile learning (m-learning) to tourism education in the developing country context. To achieve this aim, the antecedent impact of self-efficacy and the moderator role of innovativeness on the attitude and intention to adopt m-learning have been investigated using the technology acceptance model (TAM).

A survey of 176 participants from three prominent tourism education institutes in Dhaka, Bangladesh, has been conducted. Partial least squares-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) has been used to analyze the data.

While the findings confirmed the antecedent effect of self-efficacy on the intention to adopt m-learning, the moderating effect of innovativeness was not found to be as significant for the attitude-intention link.

Data have been collected only from one country and from current tourism students. Future studies on several developing countries with different potential users would bring more in-depth insights.

Tourism education institutes need to focus on students’ self-efficacy to build a positive attitude and behavioral intention toward m-learning when launching mobile-based education services.

The study provides theoretical underpinnings enabling tourism educators to better understand tourism students’ behavioral intention to use m-learning, in particular in the developing country context. By applying TAM to tourism education to examine the effects of students’ self-efficacy and innovativeness, a better explanation of the adoption of m-learning in tourism education is provided.