The influence of selling behaviors on customer relationships in financial services

Purpose – To compare the selling orientation (SO) versus customer orientation (CO) selling behavior of a service employee and examine the impacts of SO versus CO behavior on customer relationship quality and retention in financial services selling. Specifically, this research hypothesizes that a salesperson's SO is negatively related to relationship quality while salesperson's CO is positively related to relationship quality.Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework is proposed that considers customer retention as a consequence, and a service employees' SOCO behavior as an antecedent of, relationship quality. Structural equation modeling techniques are applied to data collected from customers in the two important financial services (insurance and banking) in Taiwan to test the framework.Findings – A service employee with CO approach increases relationship quality while a SO approach decreases relationship quality with customers. Furthermore, relationship quality is verified to positively affect...