Cultivating high quality relationships with customers is of paramount importance in the banking sector. However, there has been little effort to examine relationship quality (RQ) in financial services, and though the evaluation of RQ should depend on the experience provided, empirical evidence on how customer experience may contribute to RQ is scant. Therefore, based on data collected from 227 retail banking clients, analysed using PLS-SEM, the purpose of this study is to understand the role played by customer experience on RQ in retail banking, and its impact on relational outcomes, comparing customers with and without a dedicated account manager.

Introduction

Owing to the intangibility, long-term delivery and complexity of financial services (FS), also characterized by considerable uncertainty (Ponsignon et al., 2015), cultivating high quality relationships with customers is of paramount importance (Ndubisi, 2007; O’Loughlin et al., 2004), particularly in an age of increased depersonalization, homogenization and automation in the industry (Barari and Furrer, 2018; Rajaobelina and Bergeron, 2009). A strong relationship is an intangible asset not easily duplicated by competitors (Wong et al., 2007) that reflects the psychological connection that customers have with a service provider (e.g. Crosby et al., 1990; DeWulf et al., 2001). Relationship Quality (RQ) has been defined as “the degree of appropriateness of a relationship to fulfil the needs of the customer” (HennigThurau and Klee, 1997, p.751), and it means that the customer is able to trust and rely on providers integrity because the level of past performance has consistently been satisfactory (So et al., 2016). Numerous authors (e.g. Roberts et al., 2003; Grégoire and Fisher, 2006; Wu and Li, 2011) have acknowledged that maintaining high quality relationships fosters loyalty-related outcomes, such as customers’ willingness to provide referrals and to pay a price premium. Therefore, according to Hennig-Thurau et al. (2002), the RQ approach is among the most expressive ones in modelling the determinants of relationship marketing outcomes. Because of the lack of concreteness of service outcomes high in credence qualities, functional attributes associated with customer experience (i.e. how the service is delivered), such as accessibility, professionalism, and empathy of FS providers, are likely to heavily contribute to consumer’s evaluation of their relationship with the bank (Eisingerich and Bell, 2007; Roy, 2018). In fact, although the banking industry is identified as “weak experiential” and goal oriented, “process” factors are pivotal to the service experience provided by a bank (O’Loughlin et al., 2004), and may play a more dominant role than technical, outcome-based factors, intrinsically difficult for customers to evaluate (Bell and Eisingerich, 2007).