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How to get lost customers back?

A study of antecedents of relationship revival

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Abstract

Most research in the field of customer relationship management has focused on keeping existing customers. However, some companies also systematically address lost customers and try to revive these relationships. This facet of customer relationship management has been largely neglected by academic research. Our study provides a theoretical discussion and an empirical analysis of factors driving the success of relationship revival activities. Drawing on equity theory, we find that the customer’s perceived interactional, procedural, and distributive justice with respect to revival activities positively affect his or her revival-specific satisfaction which in turn, has a strong impact on revival performance. Furthermore, revival performance depends on customer characteristics (variety seeking, involvement, age), and the overall customer satisfaction with the relationship.

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Notes

  1. Focusing on a single company and its lost customers is consistent with the empirical approach taken by Thomas et al. (2004). Since there is evidence that only a small number of firms engage in systematic activities to recapture lost customers (Stauss and Friege 1999) there is probably no alternative to a single-company approach in the context of data collection. In addition, we made sure to select a time period for analysis where there were no major changes in the telecom provider’s service offerings.

  2. Market research experts of the company familiar with customer’s response behavior to telephone surveys indicated that 10 min of duration for the telephone interviews was an absolute maximum and that average duration should be no more than 7 min. Having short interviews was particularly important for those interviewed previous customers who had not revived the relationship since some of them still had a fairly negative attitude towards the company.

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Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support of Frank Sieben in collecting and analyzing the data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Mannheim, L 5, 1, 68131, Mannheim, Germany

    Christian Homburg

  2. Department of Marketing, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station B6700, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Wayne D. Hoyer

  3. Technical University Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 1, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany

    Ruth Maria Stock

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  1. Christian Homburg
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  2. Wayne D. Hoyer
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Correspondence to Christian Homburg.

Appendix

Appendix

Specific measurement items

Revival-related justice dimensions

 

Revival-related interactional justice (IJ)a

(α = 0.92; FR = 0.95; AVE = 0.67)

The company’s employees were very politeness.

The company’s employees tried to create a comfortable atmosphere when interacting with me.

 

The company did appear to be telling me the truth.

 

The company’s employees were highly empathic towards my needs.

 

The company’s employees could take in my perspective very well.

 

The company’s employees were highly engaged in solving my problem.

 

The company’s employees seemed to be highly engaged in general.

 

The company’s employees gave a reasonable account as to why the organizational problem occurred.

 

The company’s employees had a high level of autonomy with respect to customer-related decisions.

 

Revival-related procedural justice (PJ)a

(α = 0.88; FR = 0.91; AVE = 0.63)

The company reacted very quickly to my termination.

During the telephone call with the company clear agreements were made.

 

The company’s readiness to provide information was very high.

 

I was involved in the company’s decisions.

 

The company was willing to adapt their revival procedures to satisfy my needs.

 

The company was very open toward my suggestions.

 

Revival-related distributive justice (DJ)a

(α = 0.97; FR = 0.98; AVE = 0.89)

The company’s offer was generous.

I assessed the company’s offer as appropriate.

 

I perceived the company’s offer as fair.

 

The company presented an offer that met my expectations.

 

This company considered my personal needs in providing this offer.

 

The solution offered has high value for me.

 

Customer characteristics

 

Variety-seeking (VS)a

(α = 0.76)

I really like to try new things.

 

I am always searching for changes.

 

Involvement (I)a

(α = 0.75; FR = 0.82; AVE = 0.63)

Mobile calling is important to me.

Compared to other products/services, mobile phone service is highly important to me.

 

I am well informed about mobile telephoning.

 

Customer age (CA) (objective measure)

 

Relationship characteristics

 

Overall customer satisfaction (OCS)b

 

Overall, how satisfied you are with the products/services you receive from the company? Are you very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, neither satisfied or dissatisfied, somewhat dissatisfied, or very dissatisfied?”

 

Age of relationship (objective measure)

 

Revival satisfaction and revival performance

 

Revival-specific customer satisfaction (RCS)a

(α = 0.94)

I am very satisfied with the efforts made by this company.

 

I was happy how the organization handled my termination.

 

Revival performance (RP) (objective measure)

 

Reason for defection

 

How strong affect the following criteria the termination of the relationship with this company? Please distribute 100 points according to the impact of the following three criteria.

 

... product-related issues.

 

... price-related issues.

 

... service-related issues.

 
  1. a5-point Likert-type scales with “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree” as anchors were employed
  2. b5-point Likert-type scale with “very satisfied” and “very dissatisfied” as anchors was employed

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Homburg, C., Hoyer, W.D. & Stock, R.M. How to get lost customers back?. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 35, 461–474 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-007-0031-7

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