The impact of the quality of technical support in enhancing buyers' attitudes and behaviors.

摘要

In a highly competitive market, certain suppliers usually offer technical support as a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors and to maximize profitability with current customers. The main purpose of this study is to develop and empirically test a conceptual model that shows the impact of the quality of tech support on customers' attitudes and behaviors in an organizational buying context. Both exploratory and confirmatory analyses were conducted to examine the dimensionality and psychometric properties for each of the six constructs, followed by measuring the fit of the proposed structural equation model. This study identifies three main mechanisms by which tech support influences customers' repurchasing intentions. First, tech support can enhance customers' perceived quality and trust, which can in turn increase their repurchasing intentions. Second, satisfaction with the service highly affects trust in the supplier, which in turn leads to repurchasing intentions, where trust and satisfaction can be achieved after cumulative satisfying transactions. Third, tech support may not increase customers' perceived value. The present conceptual model demonstrates that despite the high competition, competing mainly on the basis of price reduction of goods offered will not necessarily increase customers' repurchasing intentions.