Customer Loyalty: Do Firm And Salesperson Get What They Desired?

On the B2B market, there exist two forces in the battle for customer loyalty. On one hand, selling firms attempt to create customer satisfaction by providing more customer value. On the other hand, salesperson tries to develop a relationship with customer to obtain a close bond. Nonetheless, such close bond, salesperson-owned loyalty, is a big threat to selling firms. How to achieve victory in the battle is an issue for the selling firms.From the governance of the salesperson-owned loyalty perspective, this study focused on the behaviors of selling firms and salesperson. Using dyadic data from buyers and sellers, we investigated the influences of selling firm’s and salesperson’s behaviors on the ascription of customer loyalty. We further compared and analyzed the different influences of different behaviors on customer loyalty.The results indicated that different selling firm’s relation-specific investments have different influence preference to two types of customer loyalty, or loyalty to the selling firm and salesperson-owned loyalty. The scrutiny on salesperson’s behaviors shows that salesperson brand-building behaviors and guanxi behaviors have different emphases on buyer’s loyalty ascription. Furthermore, this paper gives a preliminary discussion on the interaction effect of firm’s and salesperson’s behaviors. Our results have a practical guiding significance for the selling firms.