논문 상세보기
Preferred customer communication contacts in services
Services have continuously been growing and over the last years have become an increasingly important part of the worldwide economy (Kanso and Kitchen, 2004; Margetts, 2012). More importantly, with rapid developments of interactive marketing communications service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are increasing becoming the determinants of business success factors in the service sector (Parasuraman and Grewal, 2000; Caruana, 2002, Aksoy et al 2012). Particularly, when the production of service delivery is associated with communication, customer relationship and people intensiveness, customer evaluations of the service quality become even more critical when crossing boundaries (Kanso and Kitchen, 2004). In recent years, multi-channel customer contacts such as self-service web chat, phone, and email points of customer interaction modes are in focus (e.g., Cooper et al 2009; Robertson, 2012) to enhance customer service experience and satisfaction. Although marketing academics and practitioners agree that identifying suitable communication channels is vital for company’s long term success, there is an on-going debate in the literature whether this integrated multi-channel communication platform is right for the customers and is effective for service quality, customer service satisfaction and loyalty in this turbulent and ever changing global environment. Realistically, not all customers have the same level of technological skills or prefer using the same communication vehicle. As marketers remain concerned whether to standardise customer communication channels or not, a need arises to understand customer choices of their preferred communication interaction and type of communication contact. Therefore, there is a need to pay a greater attention to the determinants, which might have an impact on the relationship between customers’ communication mode choices and service quality as well as between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This paper aims to fill the aforementioned gaps by combining various elements into the theoretical model and providing a more complete picture of the interconnectedness of the elements of multichannel communication contacts from a process and technology perspective. Thus, a theoretical framework for modelling the determinants of customer choice of communication modes should be of interest for international and global services companies.
