The emergence of online and mobile technologies has necessitated the need to re-examine the viability of relationship marketing in nurturing business-to-business service relationships. By drawing upon the resourcebased view (RBV), social exchange (SE) theory and socio-technical systems (STS) theory, this research explores the differences in the process by which local, national and foreign branded banks are able to integrate their online platforms into their relational efforts. Data from a sample of 336 small and medium-sized business customers in the New Zealand banking industry shows that both offline and online service quality affect satisfaction with their e-banking services, which in turn affect the trust and commitment towards the bank and loyalty towards e-banking. In addition, the effect of trust and commitment on loyalty towards e-banking is significantly stronger for the local and national branded banks compared to foreign branded banks. Our findings extend current research on B2B relationship marketing and offer useful managerial insights for professional B2B services providers.

Introduction

Relationship marketing (RM) literature highlights the importance of building and maintaining long-term relationships with customers, in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumers (B2C) markets. Within the B2B domain, researchers use the social exchange (SE) perspective (e.g. Kingshott, 2006; Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Tsarenko & Simpson, 2017) to study firm-customer relationships based on the “trust-based commitment” paradigm, a dominant approach in modelling the firm-customer relationships due to its intuitive appeal and empirical support over the years, especially in the banking context (e.g. Milne & Boza, 1999; van Esterik-Plasmeijer & van Raaij, 2017; Yousafzai, Pallister, & Foxall, 2005). However, it is not clear if this perspective would still hold in today’s highly competitive global marketplace that has embraced new technologies as a crucial mechanism of interacting with the customer. The question then needs to be asked is whether the growth of online and mobile banking technologies is conducive to service firms being able to continue to leverage existing customer trust and commitment towards the service brand to influence these customers to use such technologies, and through that yield e-loyalty. E-loyalty is a desired outcome in the introduction of such technologies because it signifies customers are committed to using this mode of interaction which is critical for those service firms that have invested in technology to configure and design their operations and processes. This issue is particularly important in those B2B service contexts, where face-to-face and social interactions are still regarded a critical aspect of the relationship, because changing marketplace dynamics that involve technology and service separation (e.g., Keh & Pang, 2010) may ironically impede the capacity of firms to leverage trust and commitment. For example, ASB bank in New Zealand recognises the importance of new technologies but also the need to maintain face-to-face interactions with their banking customers. By developing a new video service, those customers that want face-to-face interactions can do so but now with the aid of technology at a time and place convenient to them (ASB, 2018). As a result, we need to re-examine the sustainability of “trust-based commitment” paradigm in light of the emergence of online and mobile technologies because (1) these have changed the way most service businesses interact with their customers (Laukkanen, 2016), and, (2) global deregulation across businesses (e.g. Kandilov, Leblebicioğlu, & Petkova, 2016) has made marketplaces more competitive and accessible – thus increasing vulnerability to foreign firms.