Trust theory and customer services research: theoretical review and synthesis

ABSTRACT

Research has revealed service industries’ benefits from customer trust including positive effects on commitment, loyalty, sales effectiveness, and collaborative, cooperative, and successful exchange relationships. Yet, despite the relevance of customer trust, gaps remain in our understanding regarding its implications and effective management. Commencing with a consideration of the theoretical foundations of trust, this theoretical review paper highlights the key trust theories synthesising service industries and management literatures on trust, its levels, development, violations, and repair. Drawing on this, recommendations are offered for scholars regarding future research as well as for service firms and their representatives regarding enabling customer trust.

摘要

研究表明，服务业受益于客户信任，这包括对承诺，忠诚度，销售效率以及协作，合作和成功的交换关系的积极影响。然而，尽管客户信任对服务业尤为重要，我们对其影响和有效管理的理解仍存在缺口。在考虑信任的理论基础上，本理论综述重点介绍了主要的信任理论，并综合了客户信任在服务业和管理学文献中的表现，对其级别，发展与增长，违规和修复做出了归纳和总结。以此为据，为学者们提供相关的未来研究的建议，并为服务公司及其代表提供如何实现信任的建议。

KEYWORDS:

• Trust
• customer trust
• trust levels
• trust development
• trust violations
• trust repair
• service firms
• service industries

关键词:

• 信任
• 客户信任
• 信任等级
• 信任发展
• 违反信任
• 信任修复
• 服务公司
• 服务业

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a similar format applied see, for instance, Korsgaard et al. (2018) and Rose-Krasnor (1997).

2 See Bozic (2017) for a systematic literature review on consumer trust repair.

3 Trust repair strategies are not exclusively linked to one of those six trust repair approaches. Each approach contains various repair strategies which may be used in more than one approach (Bachmann et al., 2015).

4 Verbal strategies such as apologies, denials, and compensations are most often referred to in relation to the relational approach and are consequently discussed in detail then.

5 See the works of, for instance, Crossan and Apaydin (2010), (2017), Knoll and Matthes (2017), Mari and Poggesi (2013), Paul and Benito (2018), and Rosado-Serrano et al. (2018) serving as role models for diverse types of systematic reviews.