Research On Customer-to-customer Interaction's Influence On Re-patronage Intention

In recent decades, more and more enterprises recognize the important significance of establishing and developing the relationship with customers. As the most accurate prediction indicator of customers buying behavior, the customer behavior intention has more diversified and complicated influence factors which make the researchers expand the study angle and field gradually. For a long time, the study focus scholars have been considering is how to realize good interaction between enterprises or their staff and customers to influence customer re-patronage intention in the field of service marketing a customer relationship management. But a lot of empirical research shows that the customer-to-customer interaction (CCI) is widespread phenomenon in service industries and has much higher interactive frequency than customer-employee interactions, especially in service encounters, such as the interactions between retail shoppers, between restaurant customers, or between business travelers, as well as interactions between any customer groups sharing the same public business environment with the other customers. Whether CCI would influence customer re-patronage intention in unique ways, how the process is, and how different individual characteristics and behavior difference influence re-patronage intention, which is all worth further discussing.However, the research on CCI in theory circles is just beginning, particularly lack of attention on specific CCI in service industry and its relationship with the customer re-patronage intention. Actually, for high service encounter industry, providing customer experience has gradually become the foundation and fundamental demands of enterprise competitive advantages, profits and market, and the re-patronage intention is decided to a certain extent by the customer value with experience as the kernel, besides, CCI must be one of the important influencing factors of customer experience value. Considering the industry dependence character of CCI and from the view angle of the experience, this paper first analyzes the influencing process of CCI on re-patronage intention; Secondly,On this basis, this paper build the analytical framework "CCI—customer experience value—customer re-patronage intention ";Thirdly, empirical research is carried out based on416survey samples from team travelers. As a result, the influencing mechanism of CCI on customer re-patronage intention has been interpreted clearly and completely, so the study of the relationship between CCI and customer purchase behavior intention get deeper discussed, at the same time, CCI comes out prominently as the important factors influencing the re-patronage intention,which is important for strengthen CCI management and control.Taken together, this paper mainly gets the following research results and conclusions:First, CCI from the perspective of the experience can reflect customers'real feeling process,and the theoretical analysis framework "CCI—experience value—re-patronage intention "describe the effect process of CCI on customer re-patronage intention distinctly and accurately from this perspective.Under service-dominant logic, CCI is an important breach of service marketing and relationship marketing research and the key areas for further research of the service encounter theory. As Nicholls (2010) has argued that, despite the importance of the study of CCI are widely showed in physical environment and its contributions are accepted increasingly, but so far, the relationship between CCI and customer behavior intention is not fully clear illuminated. Considering the nature of the customer service experience, this paper expounds the influence mechanism of CCI on customer re-patronage intention, not only lays a foundation for the relevant theories and empirical studies of CCI, but also gives some practical reference and guidance in improving customer experience value and customer re-patronage intention.Second, CCI perception are profession-specific and situation-specific,and CCI of the tour tourists in tourism industry can be divided into four constitute dimensions: etiquette violation, interference and arguments, friendly conversation, advice and assistance. Because the academia lacks of the measurement scale relatively, this study, based on the qualitative exploration under the background of China's service industry, using Critical Incidents Technique, reconstructs the CCI constitute dimensions and measurement system,also develops empirical tests, and verifies good reliability and validity of the CCI scale.Third, the high strength CCI variables have direct significant effect on re-patronage intention,and CCI can influence on re-patronage intention through the mediate role of experienct value,but the partial mediate roles of different variables have some differences. On one hand, in virtue of the coexistence of the customer and the other customer (customer group) in the same service environment, CCI is inevitable, and because the contract relationship between customers and service enterprise but the non-contract relationship between customers and the other customers, the satisfaction and dissatisfaction feelings of CCI will often attributed to service enterprise. The empirical results confirm the high strength interactive variables of interference and arguments has direct negative effect on re-patronage intention, advice and assistance has direct positive effect on re-patronage intention; On the other hand, CCI is a customer experience process, and it will impact on customer experience result—experience value directly, thus on the customer re-patronage intention indirectly. The empirical results show CCI will affect re-patronage interaction through the mediate role of experience value.In practical terms, the experience value completely mediates the relationship between etiquette violation, friendly conversation and re-patronage intention,and it plays partial mediate role during the effect process of interference and arguments,advice and assistance on re-patronage intention.Fourth, every dimension of CCI has different effect on customer experience value,and different dimensions of experience value have significantly positive effects on re-patronage intention.On one hand, etiquette violation mainly affects the emotional, cognitive and social experience value negatively; interference and arguments mainly has significant negatively effect on functional, emotional experience value; friendly conversation mainly produces positive significant influence on emotional, cognitive and social experience value; advice and assistance will have a positive significant effect on the four variables.On the other hand, Value is decided by customers not by enterprises, and the re-patronage intention is effected greatly by the customer's perception and evaluation of the value.Deriving from the theory of the customer value, customer experience value is a hierarchical whole concept, in turn, it uses the longitudinal research perspective of hierarchical experience value and focus on the inner link between the dimensions of experience value and different levels of the demand. The empirical research not only confirmed the positive effect of the traditional customer experience value of functional value, emotional value and social value dimensions on re-patronage intention, but also proves the positive effect of cognitive experience value on re-patronage intention.Fifth, gender, age, education level, profession, marital status, family income, team nature and tour line type has more or less significant difference on the research variables. Through the independent-samples T test and one-way ANOVA,this paper finds that demographic variables play different effect on the research variables. For example, considering from the impact on the re-patronage intention, unmarried tourists, tourists who join in a complete team tour and the tourists who attend long-line tour have more intense positive re-patronage intention. The results will produce certain guiding role for the travel agencies to make team and line program and choose their goal customers,(the specific effect of all the demographic variables are as shown in6.4.6)Compared with other related studies, this paper discusses the effect mechanism of CCI on customer re-patronage interaction from the perspective of customer experience, it enriches and develops the theory of CCI.Moreover, it plays a positive promoting role on extending and deepening the CCI consequences research,so, in some ways, it makes up the deficiency of previous researches. The main innovation points reflected in the following four aspects:Firstly, Putting CCI as an important research breakthrough of service marketing and relationship marketing research under Service-dominant Logic,this paper is from the unique perspective of customer experience, fully explains the influence mechanism of CCI on customer re-patronage intention,and constructs the theoretical analysis framework of "CCI—experience value—re-patronage intention ". Secondly, considering the customer perceptions situation-specific, this paper qualitatively explores the constitute dimensions of CCI and reconstructs the corresponding measurement index system. Thirdly, from the perspective of customer experience, this paper constructs the concept model on the basis of analyzing the effect mechanism of CCI on customer re-patronage intention, and through the on-site investigation from the team travelers, the empirical study tests the model's reliability and validity. In addition, the direct effect relations of CCI on re-patronage intention get partial verified, as well as the mediate role of the experience value during the effect process of CCI on re-patronage intention. In the meantime, it verifies different effect of four dimensions of CCI on customer experience value.Fourthly, examining and finding the effect difference of different levels of demographic variables on the dimensions of CCI, customer experience value and re-patronage intention, this paper will have great significance and value for enterprises to develop good customer relations management.