Authors: Barbara Lewis; Judy Zolkiewski
Early work in business-to-business markets indicated the importance of customer service (e.g. Cunningham and Roberts, 1974). More recently, customer service appears to be an implicit assumption within the notion of relationships, be it from an interaction or other relationship perspective: feedback occurs through the interactions that occur between customer and supplier (Håkansson, 1982 Turnbull and Valla, 1986 Ford, 2002). However, this feedback will often be informal in nature and may well be given to technical personnel. The question of how this can be best collated and used for strategic purposes then becomes vital. Some researchers suggest that the collection of such market intelligence is the role of the sales engineers although, in practice, this can be fraught with problems such as pressure to achieve new sales and failures in management information systems (Donaldson, 1998). Little explicit attention seems to be given to this issue in either the business-to-business marketing or the sales management literature. Indeed, Parasuraman (1998) has remarked upon the paucity of research into customer service in business-to-business markets.On the other hand, within consumer service markets, the collection of customer feedback appears to have become integral to the service process itself. Indeed, a number of tools have been proposed and are widely discussed within the service quality literature, e.g. Grönroos (1984, 1988) and Zeithaml et.al. (1988). Our present research project seeks to investigate how customer feedback can be collected, collated and utilized within a business-to-business setting that covers a range of diverse business interfaces (e.g. from a four-hour service visit to a major hotel chain, to the complete installation of a multi-million pound fire protection system), and customers (e.g. the end user, an architect, a prime contractor or a combination of these). In so doing, we also aim to establish the key determinants of customer service in modern day business-to-business relationships.In this paper, we review the different streams of literature which are appropriate to our research, and discuss the methodological challenges that research into customer service in business-to-business situations presents.
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Publish Year: 2003
Conference: Lugano, Switzerland (2003)