Trust and commitment influences on customer retention: insights from business-to-business services

Despite the importance of trust and commitment in relationship marketing, the scholarly inquiry on the issue is rather impeded in several ways. Furthermore, when it comes to the marketing of services and specifically for business-to-business (B2B) markets, the empirical documentation is even slimmer despite the fact that services are increasingly becoming a vital component of the product that the customers buy even when it comes to tangible goods such as computers or cars. In view of this gap, the present empirical study attempts an investigation of two specific antecedents of trust and consequently of commitment: the perceived quality of the service and the customer bonding techniques used by the supplier. In doing so, the causality of the relationships between the various constructs is also examined. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.