A neglected strategy of partial service termination and its impact on customers’ patronage
Résumé
This research introduces the strategy of partial service termination (PST) and its consequences on customers’ patronage. PST is a company’s strategy where the company decides to stop providing a service while maintaining the relationship with the customer; it represents an in-between strategy between other investigated strategies, like service demotion and service termination. Using longitudinal and archival data from 26,464 clients of a large
French insurance company, from 2014 to 2019, results show that PST exerts a negative effect on customers’ patronage. Build on justice theory, we explain that customers tend to restore justice after a PST by terminating their other contracts with the company, in the vein of “an eye of an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Moreover, we find relationship length to play a protective effect here, as customers reduce less their patronage after a PST as their
relationship is longer.
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