The Research On The Impact Of Customer-to-customer Interactions On Relationship Quality In The Service Encounter

In the field of services marketing, the focus of attention of researchers is how to effectively manage customer-to-service staff interaction in order to establish or maintain a good relationship between the customer and the enterprise for a long time. In fact, the customer-to-customer interactions are much higher than the customers-to-service staff interactions both in the frequency and quantity. However, the study on customer-to-customer interactions is still in its infancy in theory, especially in high-touch service industry, service experience has gradually become the fundamental demands of customers. For this reason, improving customer service experience is the only way to consolidate and develop good relationship with customers for service enterprises. The customer-to-customer interactions as a widespread phenomenon in service encounters, is one of the important factors that affects customer perception of the service experience. Therefore, what is the degree of the customer-to-customer interactions impact on service experience and how it influences the relationship quality assessment are both worthy of further exploration.This paper starts from the customer-to-customer interactions in service encounters, then introduces practical and theoretical background to the study, then points out that the purpose and significance of the study and describes the major qualitative and quantitative research methods used in the process. The paper reviews the domestic and international representative research results about service encounters, customer-to-customer interactions, service experience and relationship quality, then establishes a "customer-to-customer interactions-service experience-relationship quality" theoretical models and proposes research hypothesis. After making the operational definitions of variables and collecting sets of indicators to measure those, the researcher further amend the measurement scale by pre-test. The study collects a large sample of 404 through third party and randomly divided it into two parts, one of which to use SPSS software for exploratory factor analysis and extracts eight common factors, the other is to use AMOS software for confirmatory factor analysis and confirms that each factor matches the research model. Then the researcher uses structural equation model for path analysis to assess the significance and predictive power of the theoretical model. The results shows that different forms of customer-to-customer interactions both have significant influences on all levels of service experience and different levels of service experience also have different degree of influence on relationship quality. It also shows that different forms of customer-to-customer interactions have different ways to impact relationship quality. Finally, the article cites the conclusions implications for service business management practices and points out the innovation of this study. The researcher also illustrates the limitations of the study and gives suggestions for future research.