The dark side of customer relationship management: Exploring the underlying reasons for pitfalls, exploitation and unfairness

Unfairness in consumer services: Outcomes of differential treatment of new and existing clients

“…This setting is also relevant because service firms have the ability to utilize customers' data for differential treatment (Nguyen and Simkin, 2013) and are known to deploy frequent customization practices. Moreover, in services word of mouth tends to be more prevalent (Nguyen, 2012) and therefore consumers become more aware of prices offered to other customers. Other market related criteria, such as strong competition, the free market and switching, which prevail in the retail and service industries, increase the likelihood of firms acting in an unfair way (Nguyen and Klaus, 2013).…”

“…Though attracting prospective customers is important, long-term success in highly competitive markets is contingent on customer retention over customer acquisition (Nguyen, 2012). However, in terms of differential pricing, prospective customers are still offered the best deals (Tsai and Lee, 2007).…”

“…Credibility pertains to intentions and ability to keep promises (Guiltinan, 2006), while benevolence trust has been defined as a willingness of an exchange party to be vulnerable to the actions of another party in whom one has confidence (Doney et al, 2007). Trust is a feeling of security based on the belief of favourable and positive intentions, as opposed to lying or taking advantage of the vulnerability of others (Nguyen, 2012). Trust is therefore vital in any long-term relationship (Garbarino and Johnson, 1999), and as suggested by Boulding et al (2005), the precursor to issues of consumer trust is fairness.…”

“…Building on equity theory (Adams, 1965) and the theory of distributive justice (Homans, 1961), it appears reasonable to expect unfairness to prompt negative attitudinal and behavioural consequences, namely on satisfaction (Xia et al, 2004;Haws and Bearden, 2006), trust (Sirdeshmukh et al, 2002;Guiltinan, 2006) and patronage intentions Gelbrich, 2011), chasing disadvantaged clients away from their current provider. Thus, without careful consideration of differential treatment of customers, firms' marketing efforts may be incur the risk of long-term failure (Nguyen, 2012). However, research remains fragmented (Campbell, 2007;Nguyen and Klaus, 2013) and this "dysfunctional" form of customer management has been neglected in the marketing literature (Frow et al, 2011).…”

Essays on co-operatives’ idiosyncrasies : structure, performance, and membership

“…Recent RM research (e.g., Nguyen, 2012), for example, has emphasized how customer differential treatment (e.g., favoritism) frequently leads to perceptions of exclusion. What remains relatively unexplored is the "dark side" behavior of RM (Payne and Frow, 2017), particularly how customers perceive and react to mistreatment related to inaction.…”