Online Customer Loyalty: Forecasting The Repatronage Behavior Of Online Retail Customers (kundenmanagement & Electronic Commerce)

Technology is changing the way customers and companies interact. How consumer purchasing behavior is affected by the use of technologies which enable them to purchase independently of direct service employee contact - i.e., by shopping via a technological interface rather than in a brick-and-mortar shop - is of great interest to corporations. Roberta C. Nacif investigates the behavioral consequences of self-service purchases when consumers shop via the Internet. She explores the effects that customers' assessments of service encounters experiences (attitudes) and transactional history (prior behavior) have on their subsequent purchase behavior. She analyzes two aspects of repurchase behavior: customers' decision of whether or not to repurchase from the same retailer and customers' decision about how much money to spend. The author develops a framework describing the motivations of customers to engage in relational market behavior and tests this framework with individualized customer data obtained from a major European online retailer. Over the last few years, companies paid more attention to managing custo­ mer relationships both effectively and efficiently. Among others, this led to an increased use of so-called self-service technologies (SSTs). For example, financial services are provided at lower costs and in an effective way through ATMs, airlines encourage their customers to use check-in machines, and on­ line retailers offer advice through low-cost media only. Such SSTs require hardly any personnel, and the customer him/herself so to say designs and provides the service. This development is reinforced by new telecommunica­ tion media and information technologies as well as by the increased diffusion of the Internet. Given that services play an important role in retaining custo­ mers, both academics and practitioners are interested in the question of how an increased use of SSTs affects repeat purchase behavior and the attitude of customers. From an theoretical point of view, only a few publications focused on the effects of customer satisfaction, SST quality, trust, self-stated behavi­ or, evaluation of a company's complaint management, customer knowledge about a firm's products and past purchasing behavior on repeat purchase in­ tentions and repatronage. This literature gap is prevalent both conceptually and empirically. Roberta Nacif, who submitted this book as her dissertation at WHU (Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management), filled some of this gap with her work. Roberta C. Nacif investigates the behavioral consequences of self-service purchases via the Internet. She explores the effects of customers' assessments of self-service encounters experiences (attitudes) and transactional history (prior behavior) on their subsequent purchasing behavior and analyzes customers' decision of whether or not to repurchase from the same retailer and of how much money to spend. Front Matter....Pages i-xxii Introduction....Pages 1-8 Conceptual Foundations....Pages 9-16 Concept and Importance of Repatronage Decisions....Pages 17-26 Conceptual Development of a Repatronage Decision Framework....Pages 27-156 Repatronage Decisions as an Empirical Problem....Pages 157-285 Conclusion....Pages 287-309 Back Matter....Pages 311-361