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Introduction
Not all consumers want close relationships with firms and not all firms develop extensive relationships with their customers. Whether a relationship is recognized as such by consumers or firms, the fact is that consumers engage in sequences of experiences with firms over time and positive outcomes are possible for firms that manage those experiences successfully. Firms are increasingly structuring multi-channel service delivery systems to manage experiences and using customer information to enable mutually beneficial and lasting exchanges with their customers.
With increasing complexity in the service system, new business practices and technology applications have been conceived with the purpose of facilitating the communication among different functional areas (i.e. sales, marketing, and service) and synchronizing the data produced by different information systems in the organization. This leads to a better customer experience and helps firms stimulate repurchase behaviors and discover additional business opportunities through accurate customer recognition across multiple service channels (e.g. call centers, retail outlets, ATMs, etc.). Managers understand that synchronizing customer information across the organization facilitates business process improvements that yield higher productivity levels and better customer service. Viewing the process through the customer's lens, it appears that the service interactions with the firm gain fluency.
The benefits seem clear, but how can firms assess the fluency of interactions with customers in a multi-channel service system? And more importantly, does higher interaction fluency have an impact on customers' intentions to conduct future business with the firm? This study explores the important concept of interaction fluency as a key process measure ([10] Denton, 2005) and attempts to provide further insights into these questions.
This paper is organized in three sections. First, we provide the conceptual background of our model. Second, we describe our research methodology and present empirical results. Third, we follow with a brief discussion of our findings and conclusions; discuss the limitations of our study and recommend future research for both practitioners and researchers.
Conceptual background
An initial set of attributes of interaction fluency in a multi-channel service system, come from examining the service marketing literature. A broad concept of service quality has been studied extensively in the last two decades since the publication of the seminal conceptualization of [12] Grönroos (1984) and the first appearance of the SERVQUAL model of [17]...