Expanding Business-to-Business Customer Relationships: Modeling the Customer's Upgrade Decision
构建了一个企业客户升级服务合同的决策模型，发现客户满意度、服务质量和价格显著影响升级决策，且服务质量的适度提升能大幅增加升级可能性，对供应商管理合同和整体客户关系有指导意义。
This article develops a model of a business customer's decision to upgrade service contracts conditional on the decision to renew the contract. It proposes that the firm's upgrade decision is influenced by (1) decision-maker perceptions of the relationship with the supplier, (2) contract-level experiences, and (3) interactions between firm- and contract-level variables. The authors model the firm's decision as a binary logit model with random parameters for the contract-level variables and fixed parameters for the firm-level variables. They estimate the model with data describing more than 2000 service contracts and find that decision-maker satisfaction, service quality, and price have a significant effect on the decision to upgrade; price and satisfaction also moderate the effect of service quality on the decision. Simulations indicate that modest improvements in service quality for a focal contract can have a relatively large, positive effect on the likelihood that the firm will upgrade. The results suggest that suppliers need to manage their firm relationships at both the individual contract level and the overall firm level. In addition, the results suggest specific windows of opportunity for suppliers when firms may be more likely to upgrade to higher-level service contracts.