THE ASSYMMETRIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, DISSATISFACTION, LOYALTY AND FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE IN B2B COMPANIES

It has been argued and is often assumed that the financial performance of service organisations relies on the generation of high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty (see for example, Heskett et al, 1994, Rucci et al, 1998, Reichheld and Markey, 2000, Vander merwe, 2000, Fredericks, 2001, Reichheld, 2004). However a number of contributions to the services marketing and service operations literatures over the past decade have called this into question and empirical studies have begun to demonstrate service contexts in which customer satisfaction and loyalty do not always correlate positively with financial performance (Wiley, 1991, Loveman, 1998, Silvestro and Cross, 2000, Pritchard and Silvestro, 2005, Kamakura, 2002). Most of these empirical studies have been based on business to consumer contexts, and on latitudinal rather than longitudinal data (notable exceptions here being Bernhardt and Donthu, 2000 and van der Wiele et al, 2002). This paper explores the relationship between customer satisfaction, loyalty an