Investigating relationship between personality characteristics and friendship Relationships between service providers and customers

Abstract

Providing services for attracting, maintaining, and retaining customers is one of the main tools of service organizations in order to survive in today's competitive environment. High-contact service is not exceptional as well. One of the contexts in which these services can be used greatly for retaining and satisfaction of customers is the virtual space, friendship relationships between service providers and customers. In this paper, the relationship between customer personality characteristics and friendship relationships between service providers are studied. The sample consisted of 345 high-contact service customers in Isfahan of which 154 were male and 191 female. The impact of extroversion, sociability, stability, and openness to experience variables on friendship service as well as the impact of friendship service on customer satisfaction and retaining were studied. LISREL8.5 software was used for model fitting and statistical analysis was performed using SPSS16 software. The results show that hypotheses related to significant impact of extroversion and sociability variables on friendship service as well as friendship service on satisfaction and retaining, and satisfaction on retaining were confirmed. But the significant impacts of stability and openness to experience on friendship service were rejected.

Keywords

• high-contact service
• friendship relatinship
• personality characteristics