INVESTIGATING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PERCEIVED SACRIFICE AND B TO B CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY

The Romanian insurance market expanded rapidly during the last two decades. Presently, the Insurance Supervisory Commission (CSA) reports 43 insurance companies and 567 insurance brokers. In this extremely dynamic and competitive environment, it is compulsory to control key elements that generate and maintain customer satisfaction. Therefore, the hereto paper concentrates on the influence exerted by perceived sacrifice over the business to business customer satisfaction in the insurance industry. More precisely, the objective is to investigate the impact of effort, time and money spent by the business to business customer over satisfaction. The concept of satisfaction has been intensively explored in the literature due to the fact that both practitioners and academics understood that it held a great significance in determining and preserving customer relationships and therefore, long-term profitability. In the service sector, much research has been conducted in the business to consumer context, especially concentrated on the relationship between service quality and satisfaction, whereas the business to business setting received less attention. In order to explore the relationship between perceived sacrifice and satisfaction, a descriptive research design was used. A questionnaire was created using multiple items for measuring satisfaction and perceived sacrifice and also a number of identification variables. The survey concerned companies that had had benefitted from the services of an insurance broker at least once. Copies of the questionnaire were sent by email to company managers from all the main industries. A total of 85 answers were collected. With the help of SPSS tool, the two measurement scales were tested for reliability and validity and a factor analysis was performed. The next step was to calculate the composite scores for each of the two variables and to carry out the simple linear regression analysis. Our linear model considers that perceived sacrifice is the independent variable, whereas satisfaction is the dependant one. The calculated R2 indicated that perceived sacrifice explained 25% of satisfaction’s variation. We also carried out a multiple linear regression in order to investigate the impact of each of the three components and we found that unlike price and time, effort doesn’t have an influence on satisfaction. The results obtained allow a better understanding of the relationship between perceived sacrifice and satisfaction making management decisions more effective