ABSTRACT

While the existing notion of customer dependency in the business-to-business literature is that it facilitates trust, this study proposes that the relationship works in reverse for services firm–consumer dependency relationships. Using partial least squares-based structural equation modeling, the study provides evidence that rapport through service interactions and the mediation impact of competence, contractual, and goodwill trust build an evoked set of services in consumers’ minds, making them dependent on the firm at a cognitive level. However, most of the moderated and moderated mediation roles of relationship age and frequency are found as non-significant except relationship age as a moderated mediator between goodwill trust and consumer dependency relationship. Implications are provided for the services relationship literature and services firms.

Introduction

Customer dependency has been defined as the business activities that are dependent on the interaction process of the exchange partners (Svensson, 2002a; Barnes et al., 2005). However, the construction of customer dependency in the previous literature has been significantly biased towards the business-to-business (B2B) context in exploring buyer–supplier relationships and its complex interactions with other relational constructs, for instance, trust (Johnson and Sohi, 2016; Barnes et al., 2005; Lusch and Brown, 1996). Trust has been used as an outcome construct resulting from customer dependency (Yu and Liu, 2000; Gao et al., 2005), in early literature, based on the belief that customer dependency develops due to the lack of available alternatives or the lack of a price advantage, forcing parties to work together leading to a trusting relationship (Joshi and Arnold, 1997). While it is established in literature that customer dependency is an antecedent of trust in B2B relationships (Barnes et al., 2005; Gao et al., 2005), how trust-dependency relationship inter-plays in services relationship in B2C context is still unknown. The current study believes that the customer dependency–trust relationship would be reversed for the services firm–consumer context considering trust as an antecedent of consumer dependency. Services have unique characteristics (such as intangibility, inseparability, perishability and variability) and, in addition, services consumers have a distinctive cognitive process (Ngo and O’cass, 2013; Kindström and Kowalkowski, 2014). Thus, services consumers have a wide variety of alternative choices in B2C services context compared to B2B players (i.e. suppliers). This offers more flexibility to the consumers in switching service providers and thereby less dependent on a particular provider. In such situation, service providers similar to B2B buyers are willing to put more resources (Gao et al., 2005) and efforts to gain consumer trust as developing trust becomes the predominant factor to make consumers dependent on the service firm. This reverse cause of dependency makes trust as an antecedent of consumer dependency in B2C services context. To address this theory gap, trust in brand literature can help as well. It is in brand literature that consumers tend to reduce their searching time and effort and resist switching if they find one or several ‘trusted’ brands on which they can depend on (Aydin and Özer, 2005; Chaudhuri and Holbrook, 2001). In this case, previous positive experiences of trusted relationships help to create a kind of ‘evoked set’ in consumers’ subconscious minds, limiting the number of available options at their cognitive level, with the result that they become dependent on the firms involved.