Customer win-back: the role of attributions and perceptions in customers’ willingness to return

Abstract

Interest in customer reacquisition has increased as firms embrace the concept of customer relationship management. Using survey and transactional data from defected subscribers of a publishing company, we investigate how defected customers evaluate their propensity to return to the company prior to any win-back offer. We introduce a new variable for relationship marketing, general willingness to return (GWR), and show that it is strongly and positively related to the actual return decision and the duration of the restarted relationship. Combining attribution theory elements with existing win-back explanations, which focus on economic, social, and emotional value perceptions, provides a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence the GWR to a former relationship. Importantly, we learn that regardless of whose fault it is, if the reasons for the relationship termination can change or are preventable and the firm can control those changes, then the defected customer has a higher general willingness to return to the former relationship. Also, we show that the duration of time absence before relationship revival moderates the impact of GWR on second relationship duration. Furthermore, we demonstrate that satisfaction prior to defection and the length of time absence provide a reasonable basis for distinguishing defected customers who differ in their GWR. By applying our findings, we derive recommendations for firms on how to position marketing communications to recapture defected customers according to their general willingness to return.

The Impact of Service Failure Controllability and Relationship Strength on Post-Complaint Consumer Behavior - An Empirical Analysis

“…Following Pick et al [55] and Hess, Ganesan, and Klein [37], we conceptualize RS as the total number of orders during a customer's lifetime before the complaint. For this variable we went beyond the time frame of 16 months between September 2015 and December 2016 and included all orders a customer had ever placed with the retailer.…”

“…Most studies use relationship quality (RQ) [16,72] or relationship strength (RS) [11,29] as constructs to evaluate a customer's relation with the firm. In studies working with secondary data, researchers often assess the strength of a relationship based on the customer's transactional history with a firm and the expected future [6,11,37,55].…”

“…Both tests yield significant results (p < .001) so that we need to reject the null hypothesis of homoscedasticity. Following other publications [14,30,55], we use Huber-White robust standard errors in our models to account for heteroscedasticity which does not affect the significance levels of our analyses. Table 1 displays the descriptive statistics for the continuous variables.…”

Outsourcing the pain, keeping the pleasure: effects of outsourced touchpoints in the customer journey

“…Next, participants indicated their attitudes toward the focal brand (Becker-Olsen 2003; α = .98) and-if applicable-to the third party (α = .99). We also measured participants' responsibility attributions of the described touchpoint to the focal brand (controllability and locus of control dimensions: Hess et al 2003;Pick et al 2016;Tsiros et al 2004; α = .88). Further, to measure associations of the focal brand with the described touchpoint, we asked participants to indicate to what extent they associate the focal brand with attributes that describe the touchpoint in question (based on the stimuli we deducted the following potential associations: satisfying: successful, caring for customers, great service; dissatisfying: unsuccessful, inconvenient, poor quality).…”

Dormant Account Reactivation at Al–Shajar Capital

“…Under the transaction model, we demonstrate the link between the factors of general willingness to return and actual return behaviour of dormant customers. Pick, Thomas, Tillmanns, and Krafft (2016) Different customers react differently depending upon the experience in client switching, delay in contacting defected account, quality of services provided by competitor etc. The model depicted below not only highlights the importance of customer win-back exercise as it helps a company evaluate its current product and service offering against its competitors and helps in understanding the current or new trends in the market.…”