Increasingly, firms are recognizing the value of establishing close relationships with their customers as a means of retaining existing customers. Also, firms are realizing that the intangible aspects of a relationship are not easily duplicated by competition, thus providing a sustainable competitive advantage to the firm. In this paper, we provide firms with a scale for measuring the quality of these intangible relationships between service firms and their customers. We then test this scale against the related, yet dissimilar scale for service quality to determine whether the relationship quality (RQ) scale adds any further explanation of behavioral intentions. Our results indicate that relationship quality is a distinct construct from service quality and that RQ is a better predictor of behavioral intentions than service quality.

Compared to the emphasis that service quality research has received in service marketing, much less work has been done on the role of price perceptions and their effect on customer retention. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature. The authors build propositions of price’s role vis-à-vis customer value, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions and then test these propositions using empirical data from the banking industry in the United States and New Zealand. Their findings indicate that (a) price perceptions have a stronger influence on customer value perceptions than quality, and (b) price perceptions, when measured on a comparative basis, have a significant direct effect on customer satisfaction and behavioral intentions— over and above their mediated effect through the construct of customer value. These results indicate that price perceptions significantly affect customer retention and suggest that managers may benefit from actively managing consumers’ price perceptions, in addition to consumers’ quality perceptions.

The authors examine the impact of consumer involvement on consumers' willingness to engage in relationships with service providers, because healthy relationships between consumers and service providers depend on the voluntary participation of consumers in relationships. They also examine the effect that involvement has on consumers' expectations of relational efforts by the service provider. On the basis of survey results from the telecom and health sector, the authors' results indicate that more involved consumers express greater interest in engaging in relationships with service providers. Also, although high-involvement customers do not differ from their low-involvement counterparts in terms of their expectations that their service providers communicate with them regularly and be pricecompetitive, they express a greater desire for fairness in treatment and being involved in solutions to their problems. These results indicate that the opportunity exists to engage high-involvement customers in long-term relationship programs tailored to their unique needs.

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