The Development And Validation Of Customer Compatibility Scale

The central issue of this article is to explore a scale to measure customer compatibility.The phenomenon of mutual influence between the customers in the same Services scene iswidespread, and it will affect overall evaluation of customer’s service experience. In recentyears, this kind of mutual influence has become a new source of competitive advantage andacademic hot point. Martin comprehensively explored the relationship between differentcustomers who are in the same service environment, and proposed the concept of customercompatibility firstly. Since then academic areas around the customer compatibility involved theforms of customer interaction, moving the role due to interaction, customer compatibilitybehavior classification and so on. Most of those researches are qualitative and have notexplored properties and dimensions of customer compatibility systematically, which not onlyconstrains the development of theory on customer compatibility, but also be not conduciveaccurately monitor customer compatibility and provide specific management for businessmen.Therefore, we will regard developing a scale of customer compatibility as a major task in thispaper.The article firstly introduces what kind of realistic and theoretical background the researchis in, states specific research purposes as well as theoretical and practical significances of thispaper, and then makes a detailed plan for the whole research. Next, we review domestic andoverseas research achievement about customer compatibility and its related fields in recentyears, comb scale development theory in order to pave the theoretical way for the follow-upstudy of the article. During scale development process, we preliminarily proposed definitionand dimensions of customer compatibility after literature studying. Then based on assumptionof dimension, combining the literature study and depth interviews, we create a pool ofmeasurement items. With the help of the expert group and test group, items are filtered, with allthese jobs been done, an initial scale has been established. Subsequently the initial scale will bepurified by small sample through pre-test, corrected items are used for formal scale. Were-selected bigger sample for formal investigation, specified structure of customercompatibilities’ dimensions by exploratory factor analysis, tested customer compatibilities’theoretical model by confirmatory factor analysis. We successfully established a scale tomeasure customer compatibility which contains24items and five dimensions: backgroundcustomer’s characteristics, background customer’ proportion, the words and deeds ofbackground customer, direct language interaction and direct behavior interaction. At the end ofthis article we discussed practical values of the scale.