Customer engagement, dependence and loyalty: An empirical study of Chinese customers in multitouch service encounters

Abstract

The existing literature emphasizes the importance of customer engagement and customer dependence in service encounters. An essential and typical manifestation of customer engagement is the interaction between customers and service scene elements. However, previous studies have mainly focused on the interactions between customers and service providers, neglecting multiactor service encounters. With rapid technological advancements in recent decades, network-based interactions involving multiple actors have become prevalent. However, our understanding of how such interactions affect customer loyalty in multiactor service encounters is limited. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how customer-provider interactions, namely customer-employee, customer-technology, and customer-physical environment interactions, contribute to customer-perceived dependence and loyalty. We developed a research model based on motivation theory and analyzed survey data from 410 commercial bank customers in China. Our results show that technology plays a crucial role in fostering customer loyalty through both benefit-based and switching cost-based dependence, whereas employees primarily influence loyalty through customer dependence on relational benefits. This study contributes to the literature on the interactive nature of customer engagement and dependence by providing valuable insight for practitioners who manage service encounters.