The Role of Customers’ Relationship Orientation in Perceiving Relational Benefits

According to the relationship benefits approach, companies are required to provide relationship benefits to the customers in order to build and maintain the relationships, which is costly and time consuming in practice. But, the main question is whether the customers whose level of relationship is different from the others can perceive the benefits of the relationship equally or their perceived benefits of the relationship are different depending on the degree of their relationships? If so, can the Customer Relationship Index be used to classify the customers in order to increase the effectiveness of the relationship benefit programs? How do the different types of perceived relationship benefits change by the changes in the relationships? Therefore, the purpose of this study is to answer these proposed questions.

The present descriptive research is applied in nature. The statistical population of this study included the customers of the services and the samples were selected using non-probability and available sampling method. 543 individuals were surveyed using electronic questionnaires. The validity of the instruments was confirmed by three methods of content validity, convergent validity, and divergent validity; the reliability of the questionnaires was also confirmed using Cronbach's alpha, composite reliability, and the mean of the explained variance. Structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis were performed through AMOS software and the research hypotheses were tested using one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) in SPSS software. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) index and the Bartlett’s test were used to ensure the adequacy of the data for factor analysis.

The results of the analysis of the hypotheses based on ANOVA showed that the four types of relationship benefits are not the same at different levels of customer relationship orientation and the differences are statistically significant. Accordingly, the differences in the customers’ perception of trust benefits at a significant level of 0.05 as well as in their perception of social benefits, particular behavior benefits, and respect benefits at a significant level of 0.001 have been confirmed.

Perceived trust benefits may vary depending on the degree of customer relationship orientation, and the differences between the customers’ low, medium, and high relationship orientation is statistically significant. The results also showed that the customers with high relationship orientation perceive trust benefits more than the other customers. On the other hand, the results showed that social benefits have the most changes compared to other types of relationship benefits in these three groups of the customers with low, medium, and high relationship orientation. The reason for these drastic changes may be due to the fact that receiving services requires social interactions between the sellers and the buyers. In addition, the results showed that the benefits of particular behaviors have the second highest changes among the respective customers. Since the benefits of particular behaviors include discounts and lower prices for the customers, they can be very costly for the company if they are not effective. On the other hand, offering special benefits to a customer can lead to a sense of discrimination among other customers, which in turn can damage the reputation of the company. Finally, the results indicated that the benefits of respect in all the three groups of customers with low, medium, and high relationship orientation were higher compared to the social benefits and the benefits of particular behaviors. Customers with high relationship orientation perceive the benefits of respect more than the other types of benefit, which shows the importance of respect for service customers in Iran.