Building customer relationships: A comparison across multiple service encounters

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impacts of relational bonds on customer loyalty in various service encounters. Data were obtained from a sample of 621 Taiwanese customers in the securities industry. The findings are threefold. First, financial bonds have little impact on customer loyalty, social bonds create an intermediate impact on customer loyalty, and structural bonds have the greatest impact on customer loyalty. Second, social bonds influence customer loyalty more in person-to-person encounters than in interactive voice response systems or Internet encounters. Third, structural bonds affect customer loyalty more on the Internet than in person-to-person or interactive voice response system situations.