Investigating the 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 maintools of service organizations in order to survive in today's competitive environment. Highcontactservice is not exceptional as well. One of the contexts in which these services can beused greatly for retaining and satisfaction of customers is the virtual space, friendshiprelationships between service providers and customers. In this paper, the relationship betweencustomer personality characteristics and friendship relationships between service providersare studied. The sample consisted of 345 high-contact service customers in Isfahan of which154 were male and 191 female. The impact of extroversion, sociability, stability, andopenness to experience variables on friendship service as well as the impact of friendshipservice on customer satisfaction and retaining were studied. LISREL8.5 software was usedfor model fitting and statistical analysis was performed using SPSS16 software. The resultsshow that hypotheses related to significant impact of extroversion and sociability variables onfriendship service as well as friendship service on satisfaction and retaining, and satisfactionon retaining were confirmed. But the significant impacts of stability and openness toexperience on friendship service were rejected.

Keywords

• High-contact service
• Friendship relationship
• Personality characteristics