Value in professional service relationships

Business to business (B2B) professional services depend on inter-firm cooperation for the co-creation of value. Such cooperation rarely happens overnight; it requires time for the relationship to develop. The purpose of this research is to investigate how different performance attributes of a professional service differ with the tenure of the relationship.

This exploratory study utilizes seven years of longitudinal customer data provided by a B2B professional service firm. The firm's customers assess satisfaction, value, loyalty, performance quality and their image of the firm after each project.

Data were classified into three tenure related groups – i.e. transactional, emergent and mature relationships. MANOVA and post hoc contrasts of the average attribute scores of the three groups were conducted. The data support the conclusion that high performance in professional services is evident in mature relationships.

Data come from company archives and reflect the firm's efforts for tactical management of client relationships, not independent informant reports from randomly selected accounts.

Satisfaction surveys can be employed tactically by professional service providers to develop stronger relationships with their clients en route to co-creating extraordinary value from high levels of service quality and the client's high regard for the provider's professional qualities, such as expertise, customer focus and initiative.

To the authors' knowledge, no one has shown empirically the dramatic performance advantage stemming from relationships. This is important because theory suggests that customer relationships hold strategic value. Because they are immobile and inimitable, they represent a potential sustainable competitive advantage. However, relationships take time to develop. This begs the question of whether they are worth the time and effort to develop. In the professional service context, where buyer and seller seemingly must collaborate to co-create value, mature relationships indeed yield higher performance, compared to transactional and emerging relationships.