Customer engagement, non-transactional behaviors and experience in services

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to highlight the central role of bank customers’ engagement as a mediating variable between customer experience and two non-transactional customer behaviors (advocacy and attitudinal loyalty). Design/methodology/approach To test the hypothesis, a model was designed with two antecedents of bank customer engagement (satisfaction and customer emotions), and two non-transactional behaviors (attitudinal loyalty and customer advocacy). The model was tested on a sample of 1,790 customers of two Spanish banks. Findings Results confirm bank customer engagement as the mediating variable between customer experience outcomes and non-transactional behaviors. Practical implications Banks should design physical spaces with an atmosphere that will have a positive impact on their customers, and pay particular attention to interactions with contact personnel and other customers present at that moment of truth. The new concept of the branch now being introduced looks to the future, transforming it into a place to attend to and advise customers, and designed to encourage and facilitate a more personal and enduring relationship. This transformation includes longer opening hours and a concept that appears to draw from the store model. Its design is more accessible, more agile, more welcoming and more digital, conceived to attract the customer’s attention from the first moment. Originality/value The contribution of this research is related to the analysis from a theoretical and empirical perspective of the mediating impact of customer engagement between customer experience outcomes (satisfaction and emotions during the service) and non-transactional behaviors (advocacy and attitudinal loyalty).

Service quality in a post-crisis context: emotional effects and behaviours

“…The main advantage of this classification is its simplicity and the assumption that it is an approximation of the client's attitude. However, its main disadvantage is that it does not detect very specific, relevant information about consumer sentiments (Bagozzi et al, 2016), which implies a loss of explanatory power in the behaviour model (Moliner et al, 2019).…”

“…These experiences would generate a certain level of emotion with respect to the institute (Cambra et al, 2016). If emotions are positive, they should be translated into certain behaviours aimed at strengthening the customer engagement to their institute, favouring the adoption of non-transactional behaviours in them (Chahal and Dutta, 2015;Moliner et al, 2019). Therefore, customers' actions would be the result of their level of engagement with the bank (Pansari and Kumar, 2017).…”

“…The financial crisis of the early twenty-first century has negatively impacted many commercial sectors around the world, including Spain's banking and financial industry (Monferrer et al, 2016(Monferrer et al, , 2019Estrada et al, 2018;Moliner et al, 2018Moliner et al, , 2019. Despite the fact that the aftermath of the financial crisis has consistently remained a common theme in newspapers all over the world (bank rescue, the evolution of premium risk, qualification of sovereign debt), there has been less focus on its impact on a micro-economic scale (Monferrer et al, 2016).…”

“…The drastic decline in credit to families and small entrepreneurs, the payment of excessive commissions, preferential participation scandals and the harsh banking restructuring policies, among others, have challenged the strength and honesty of the banking sector (Bennett and Kottasz, 2012;Hansen, 2014;Johnson and Peterson, 2014;Monferrer et al, 2016). All of this has provoked an emotional environment that has conditioned more than ever the relationship of the clients with their banks, increasing the indices of mistrust and the number of disloyalties (Estrada et al, 2018;Moliner et al, 2019).…”

“…Second, our research adopts a holistic and integrative approach that considers the traditional dimensions of service quality including a new one that is the social quality, to identify which quality factors of service are the most valued by the clients contributing in this way to the generation of service experiences by the banks in the context of their emotionally positive branches that contribute to reinforcing the relational behaviors developed by them (Sayani, 2015;Monferrer et al, 2016;Pansari and Kumar, 2017;Moliner et al, 2019).…”