文档介绍：Jenny van Doorn & Peter C. Verhoef
Critical Incidents and the Impact of
Satisfaction on Customer Share
In business markets, the long-term nature of relationships may prompt parties to conduct “business as usual,” but
negative critical incidents (CIs) can cause a destabilization of these long-term relationships. The authors develop a
comprehensive dynamic model of customer loyalty to account for the impact of negative CIs on both the nature and
the magnitude of the relationships between satisfaction and customer share. The results indicate that CIs trigger a
stronger updating of the customer relationship, which moves customers from a business-as-usual mind-set to a
reconsideration of the relationship. Furthermore, nonlinearities in the relationships are much more pronounced in
the presence of CIs. Depending on the relationship quality, CIs have different consequences for customer
relationships, and if relationship quality is high, a negative CI can even have a positive impact on customer share.
Keywords: service failure, business-to-business relationships, customer loyalty, services, customer relationship
management, critical incidents
n business markets, the link between satisfaction and Whereas early studies devoted attention to the process of
loyalty often appears weak or even absent (Narayandas satisfaction formation (., Oliver 1980), recent research
I2005) because mature, ongoing customer–supplier rela- has focused on the relationship between customer satisfac-
tionships tend to be characterized by inertia that causes par- tion and customer loyalty (., Bolton and Lemon 1999;
ties to conduct “business as usual” and, in essence, maintain Cooil et al. 2007; Mittal, Kumar, and Tsiros 1999). In addi-
the status quo. However, in some circumstances, long-term tion to cross-sectional studies, research has begun to
relationships can destabilize, especially when negative criti- employ a longitudinal design to consider carryover effects
cal i