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tendency displayed by some staff to cultivate and
maintain the buyer-seller relationship via mutual
communications. Furthermore, the influence of
such behavior on the buyer-seller relationship also
depends on customer expectations regarding the
role(s) of the staff (Solomon, Surprenant, Czepiel,
& Gutman, 1985). For example, Soldow and
Thomas (1984) suggested that successful selling
depends heavily on the interaction between the
buyer and the seller, as defined by their level of
relational communication. Similarly, relational
selling reflects an effort on the part of the sales-
person to keep efficient communication channels
for the purpose of maintaining a good relationship
with consumers (Crosby et al., 1990; Williamson,
1983). Efforts to establish a good selling relation-
ship with customers have been discussed as a
key determinant of relationship maintenance in
life insurance (Crosby et al., 1990), wholesale
banking (Greenwich Associates, 1987), and so
forth. Hence, relational selling behavior takes the
form of an exogenous construct in the proposed
model and is hypothesized to positively influence
relational quality.
perceived network quality should be the main
focus of ISP marketers.
H4: Perceived network quality positively influ-
ences relationship quality.
service recovery
However much Internet quality is driven, ISPs
inevitably need to deal with customer dissatisfac-
tion following service failures. Service recovery
is defined as specific actions taken to ensure that
a customer receives a reasonable level of service
following the disruption of normal service (Lewis
& Spyrakopoulos, 2001). Service recovery is es-
pecially important in ISP service, because there
exist some complex issues of service failure dur-
ing the usage of ISP service. These issues may be
caused by any change of hardware or software; the
internal setup of the computer; or even a missing
password, either deliberately or accidentally. They
also could result from the infection of a computer
virus. Whenever Internet service failure happens
for any of these reasons, most customers will
argue with their ISP and ask for help rather than
figure out the technical difficulty by themselves
(sometimes it is just too difficult for customers to
solve complicated issues by themselves). Under
this circumstance, which has nothing to do with
network quality, ISPs still have to deal with the
issue of service failure with efficient service
recovery by debugging the service failure for
customers. That is also why service recovery
becomes much more critical in ISP service than
in other service sectors.
From the theory of disconfirmation paradigm
(Oliver, 1980), relationship quality is the outcome
of an evaluation process, whereby customers com-
pare their expectations of how the service recovery
should be offered to the actual experience with
the service recovery. Either a negative or positive
confirmation of expectations will change the cur-
rent levels of customers' trust in and satisfaction
with the ISP. A negative disconfirmation is said
H3: The relational selling behavior has a positive
influence on the relationship quality.
perceived network Quality
The stability of a causal attribution associated with
network quality influences customer evaluations
and future attitudes. From the previous literature,
the perception of stable network quality should
boost customer satisfaction and trust (Kettinger
& Lee, 1994; Woo & Fock, 1999), thus improv-
ing relationship quality. Some of the dominant
models relating to customer satisfaction describes
satisfaction as a function of expectations and con-
firmation resulting from a comparison between
expectation and actual performance perception
(Oliver, 1980), and perceived network quality is
the strongest influence on actual performance
and, thus, on customer perceptions. Consequently,
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