Suchergebnisse

Charitable organizations play a key role in society but face the recurrent challenge of obtaining sufficient resources to accomplish their missions. The regular donor portfolio becomes a critical element in providing stable and long-lasting funding, and its effective management has emerged as a key research area. This study investigates the impact of the donation frequency by regular donors on their donation amount over time. Drawing from temporal reframing literature, we provide an understanding of these effects as well as the moderating role of the motivations to donate (self- vs other-oriented). The study also investigates the extent to which frequency choices are influenced by the motivations to donate and by the donation options presented during registration. Using a sample of regular donors from 2013 to 2019 and applying dynamic panel data techniques, the findings reveal that higher frequencies lead to higher donations, though this effect is strengthened by self-oriented motivations and weakened by other-oriented motivations. Our study shows that motivations to donate and donation options jointly explain donation frequencies. This study provides useful guidance for charities on how to increase regular donors' perceived value and their contributions to help these organizations provide essential services to the most vulnerable groups in society.

Managing the increasing number and complexity of customer-initiated interactions across multiple channels consistently and effectively has become a key priority for marketing academics and practitioners. To achieve this, it is imperative that marketers understand how and why customers choose the available channels. In this study, we distinguish between two types of interactions, purchases and communications, and argue that the nature of these interactions influences the way customers behave in the presence of multiple channels. Drawing upon perceived risk research, this study develops an integrated conceptual framework that provides a theoretical understanding of customer channel choice for these interactions. The framework is tested empirically in financial services and the results reveal that channel choices significantly differ for purchases and communications. Channel choices for purchases are more inertial and more strongly affected by attitudes (i.e., relationship quality) than for communications. At the same time, preference for a personal touch in channel choice is more pronounced for purchases than for communications, and marketing activities are more effective at driving channel choice for communications. These results offer some recommendations for managing interactions across channels more effectively. For example, the use of personal channels is advised for managing high-risk interactions (i.e., purchases), while for low-risk interactions (i.e., communications), firms can use marketing activities to migrate customers to cheaper channels.

Building long-term, profitable, customer relationships has become a strategic mandate for service firms. In this research, the authors present a modeling framework for understanding the decision of a noncontractual customer to strengthen the relationship with the firm by migrating to a contractual relationship. Drawing upon expected utility theory, the customer migration decision is modeled as a function of expected gains (actual expectations of service usage) and losses (price of the noncontractual service). In addition, the authors investigate the direct and indirect effects of the age of the noncontractual relationship and propose a model to understand the process of expectations formation. The framework is tested empirically in a business-to-consumer context in mobile communications services. The findings provide strong support for the proposed model and they reveal that actual expected service usage and noncontractual price increase the probability of the customer migrating to a contract, and that relationship age has both direct (positive) and indirect (through expected service usage) effects on the studied behavior. The present study also provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the formation of actual customer usage expectations. Finally, the study findings have several important implications for service managers to strengthen their relationships with their current noncontractual customers. For example, they need to proactively manage customers' actual expectations about future service usage in order to increase a customer's probability to migrate to a contract.

Financial service organizations are increasingly interested in ways to improve the service experience quality for customers, while customers progressively perceive the commoditization of banking services. This is no easy task, as factors outside the control of the service firm can influence customers' perceptions of their experience. This study builds on the customer equity framework to understand the linkages between what the firm does (customer equity drivers: value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity), the social environment (social influence), the customer experience quality, and its ultimate impact on profitability. Using perceptual and transactional data for a sample of customers of financial services, we demonstrate the central role played by factors under the control of the firm (value, brand, and relationship equity) and those outside its control (social influence) in shaping customers' perceptions of the quality of their experience. We offer new insights into the moderating role of social influence in the linkages between the customer equity drivers and the customer experience quality. The managerial takeaway is that the impact of customer equity drivers on the customer experience quality is contingent on the influence exerted by other people and that enhancing customer experience quality can be a way to increase monetary returns.

Technology advances have profoundly changed the way customers and service organizations interact, leading to a multitude of service channels. This study investigates consumer habits toward service channels in order to understand the influence of these channel habits on perceptions and intentions (perceived switching costs and attitudinal loyalty) and on consumer behavior (service usage and cross-buy). We empirically test the framework in the financial services industry, and the results reveal that physical store habit increases perceived switching costs and that acquired habits toward the physical store and self-service kiosks have a positive influence on attitudinal loyalty. Perceived switching costs positively affect service usage, and attitudinal loyalty positively influences cross-buy. In addition, habits in each channel lead to an increase in the number of services acquired (cross-buy), but online and self-service kiosks channel habits negatively impact service usage, as the lack of physical presence may increase customer uncertainty. Because habits are built on the frequency and stability of channel usage, firms can manage habits by encouraging frequent interactions under stable contexts. In addition, firms should stimulate customer habits toward the physical store as it is central to the promotion of loyalty and for increasing service usage.

This study investigates a chain of effects to understand the causal path from customer informational inquiries (CIIs) and firm-initiated contacts (FICs) to customer profitability. Drawing on social exchange theory, our framework identifies a set of attitudinal (perceived relationship investment and relationship quality), behavioral (customer cross-buy and service usage), and financial (customer profitability) consequences of CIIs and FICs and also explores the extent to which customer-perceived financial risk and customer involvement shape attitudinal reactions to CIIs and FICs. Using longitudinal data for a sample of 1,990 customers measured in four different periods, the framework is tested in financial services by applying seemingly unrelated regression techniques. Our results reveal that FICs and CIIs are a particularly valuable tool for strengthening the relationship with customers with a low level of involvement but high perception of financial services risk. For highly involved customers, FICs and CIIs are not very effective; CIIs can even backfire if the customer also perceives the risk to be low. Our results highlight the importance of market segmentation for marketers to more effectively manage when and to whom they should target marketing activities (FICs) and steer CIIs.