A process theory of customer defection in business-to-business relationships

• Main Author: Hollmann, Thomas
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Subjects: business administration, marketing
• ISBN: 9780549595946; 0549595945

Customer defection is the customer-initiated reduction of a business-to-business relationship. Prior research on customer defection has focused on managing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, but calls for increased research on the issue of customer defection have been made as it has become evident that customers do not exit relationships for the same reasons for which they expand relationships. This dissertation contributes to the theory of business-to-business defection behavior by providing an integrated process-oriented theory of defection decisions. The approach used here fills a key gap in understanding the defection phenomenon by providing the framework for integrating the currently separate streams of literature investigating the antecedents of defection with the emerging stream on customer defection as a process. A discovery-oriented approach focuses on actual defection decisions of 19 customers in a variety of industries using a theoretical sampling approach. Long depth-interviews are performed with these defected customers, incorporating methods and approaches from life history research. The empirical evidence shows that customer defections are the result of a lengthy interplay of events. The emerging framework illustrates that relationships continue unless some impetus creates a change in the buyer-supplier association. The momentum toward defection is provided when relationship events violate the goals, values, and practices of the individual or the organization on the customer side. The result of such violations is defection energy, which is stored and accumulated over the course of multiple events as the result of an anchoring and updating process. The relationship continues until the cumulative defection energy has reached a threshold level. Finally, a list of key implications of these findings for marketing theory and practice is provided, such as the need to include the process and the individual's perspective in marketing models and the need to move beyond critical incidents and organizational goals in marketing practice.