Consumer Involvement in Relationship Marketing of Services

Abstract

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.

The influence of motivations in tourists’ involvement

“…In consequence, this situation requires a higher degree of involvement by the consumer (Varki & Wong, 2003) for various reasons (Laroche et al, 2003): its production requires human interaction which introduces some uncertainty in their outcomes; the delivery, in most cases, is not possible without the participation of the consumer; and there is no transfer of ownership, so the buyer cannot sell or return the product to the seller.…”

The role of knowledge management in building client relationships

“…In a study of the telecommunications and health care sector in the U.S., the authors Varki and Wong (2003) came to the following conclusion -the more clients are involved in the exchange process, the greater interest they show in building relationships with service providers, in equality within the exchange and also in active participation in solving problems. Activating the role of costumers with a high degree of involvement in problem solving processes provides the greatest possibilities of building long-term relationships (Varki and Wong, 2003).…”

“…Activating the role of costumers with a high degree of involvement in problem solving processes provides the greatest possibilities of building long-term relationships (Varki and Wong, 2003).…”

The influence of market heterogeneity on customer loyalty: a multigroup analysis

“…This favours the VP, attaining a specific degree of satisfaction with the relationship, hence motivating the customer's desire to avoid change (Varki and Wong, 2003). On the other hand, thoroughly committed customers are more inclined to attribute a considerable risk and uncertainty to a possible change (Bienstock and Stafford, 2006;Keaveney and Parthasarathy, 2001) and will therefore tend to be more loyal.…”

“…Concerning customer loyalty, we selected the scales developed by Gremler et al (2001). Lastly, with respect to the variables used to measure market heterogeneity, in the case of the customer involvement level we used a scale adapted from the works of Varki and Wong (2003). To measure the degree of propensity towards switching, the scale proposed by Antón and Rodríguez (2004) was employed.…”