Managing Customers: Analyzing the Relationship between Customer Personality, Customer Satisfaction and Willingness to Create WOM

The impact of personality traits on consumer behaviour is always an important concern for marketing researchers and practitioners. Using the theoretical lens of the OCEAN model, this paper explores the personality attributes as a set of stimuli that facilitate consumers satisfactory buying experience, resulting in a higher willingness to create word of mouth (WOM). The data was collected from consumers of different services through the convenience sampling method. The respondents were approached through different online platforms and data from 303 respondents was obtained through Google forms. 19 responses were found unsuitable for further use, so the remaining 284 appropriate questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modelling using AMOS23. The study findings suggest that willingness to create WOM has a positive relationship with customer satisfaction, while customer satisfaction can be driven by extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness attributes of consumers’ personalities. However, neuroticism and openness to experience showed an insignificant impact on customer satisfaction. The study findings guide marketing managers to consider the customer personality aspects mentioned in the OCEAN model to enhance customer satisfaction and try to obtain positive WOM from customers. This paper investigates the in-depth knowledge on the practicality of the OCEAN model concerning customer satisfaction coupled with customer willingness to create WOM.