文档介绍：Ruth N. Bolton, Katherine N. Lemon, & Peter C. Verhoef
Expanding Business-to-Business
Customer Relationships: Modeling
the Customer’s Upgrade Decision
This article develops a model of a business customer’s decision to upgrade service contracts conditional on the
decision to renew the contract. It proposes that the firm’s upgrade decision is influenced by (1) decision-maker
perceptions of the relationship with the supplier, (2) contract-level experiences, and (3) interactions between firm-
and contract-level variables. The authors model the firm’s decision as a binary logit model with random parameters
for the contract-level variables and fixed parameters for the firm-level variables. They estimate the model with data
describing more than 2000 service contracts and find that decision-maker satisfaction, service quality, and price
have a significant effect on the decision to upgrade; price and satisfaction also moderate the effect of service quality
on the decision. Simulations indicate that modest improvements in service quality for a focal contract can have a
relatively large, positive effect on the likelihood that the firm will upgrade. The results suggest that suppliers need
to manage their firm relationships at both the individual contract level and the overall firm level. In addition, the
results suggest specific windows of opportunity for suppliers when firms may be more likely to upgrade to higher-
level service contracts.
Keywords: customer relationships, upgrades, service quality, satisfaction, retention
his article focuses on the customer’s decision to tions, and information services; repair and maintenance ser-
upgrade a service contract. A product upgrade is a vices for engineering, medical, and/or other equipment; and
Tform of relationship expansion in which the customer services that support financial, health, or energy manage-
purchases an expanded offering—a higher-price, aug- ment systems. For example, General Electric, Hewle