The importance of building relationships with customers is well documented, yet the role of consumer comfort in service relationships has not been fully explored. The authors report their efforts to measure and ascertain the importance of this construct in service relationships. Their findings provide evidence that consumer comfort has a significant and incremental impact on satisfaction, trust, commitment, and active voice with service providers. Furthermore, this variable appears to provide incremental understanding of the traditional satisfaction-trust-commitment paradigm. A scale of consumer comfort is developed that exhibits validity and reliability across two provider types.

We provide a framework for physician-controlled preconditions that impact patient trust and commitment and uncover the influence that trust and commitment have on three central patient outcomes: retention, referral behavior, and ease of voice. Based on survey data from a sample of obstetric patients, we find that though the proposed preconditions have a significant effect on both patient trust and commitment, the predominance of trust on desirable outcomes such as retention, referral behavior, and ease of voice has profound implications for physicians and other health care providers in the development of patient relationship strategy.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract