Paul G. Patterson

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Marketing

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated clients’ robo-advisors adoption as a digital financial advisory platform in Thailand. Drawing upon relationship marketing theory, this study examines the influence of trust, technology anxiety, and satisfaction with current financial advisory services on intention to use. It also explores the moderating effects of...

Robo-advisor is an artificial intelligence (AI) driven professional financial service that suggests financial portfolios and offers personalised investment recommendations to clients. Since the services are high in credence properties where financial results only become manifest over time and clients typically have difficulty assessing outcomes eve...

Purpose This study examines how three psychological factors (i.e. perceived experience quality, perceived similarity and client participation) that impact client evaluations of their recent audit experiences influence client satisfaction and trustworthiness, which, in turn, affect advocacy in an small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) context. Fur...

Purpose This study examines how professional service firms' communication effectiveness (affiliative communications style, social dialogue and information provision), social cognitive capital and rapport established between an auditor and SME client are instrumental in influencing the latter's evaluation of the technical quality of an audit. Desig...

This study proposes a new giving behavior model for higher education institutions (HEI), featuring alumni connectedness as a primary predictor. This contrasts with previous studies that measured variables that showed an inconsistent influence as predictors of alumni’s desire to contribute. Alumni connectedness, built from socio-psychological litera...

Drawing upon strategic orientation logics and culture theory, this article proposes that entrepreneurial orientation and customer relationship orientation are generally complementary but become conflictual at high levels due to the organizational response to the practices these orientations invoke in a collectivist cultural context. We test this hy...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore what drives customer acceptance of frontline service robots (FSR), as a result of their interaction experiences with FSR in the context of retail banking services. Design/methodology/approach Applications of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and service robot acceptance model fra...

Purpose The inherent characteristics of professional services (i.e. high in credence properties, customized and featuring information asymmetry) often cause difficulties for clients to confidently evaluate technical outcomes before, during or even after service delivery. This results in considerable client psychological discomfort. This study aims...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the personal/situational and business factors that encourage or discourage pro bono service of professionals based on the theory of institutional logics framework and the extended purchase behavior model. Design/methodology/approach This paper collected the data using a mixed-method appro...

Purpose Robots are predicted to have a profound impact on the service sector. The emergence of robots has attracted increasing interest from business scholars and practitioners alike. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of the business literature about the impact of service robots on customers and employees with the objective of guidi...

Due to rapid developments of service robots, artificial intelligence and other new technologies (including big data, analytics, speech recognition, biometrics, mobile and cloud technologies, and geo-tagging) the service sector is facing a new wave of digitalization, including at the customer interface. Service robots, defined as system-based autono...

Purpose This study aims to examine the extent to which clients’ perceptions of a financial auditor’s communication style affect their psychological comfort and trust when considering whether to retain the incumbent firm for future financial audits. Design/methodology/approach A multistage method was used comprising integrated results from a litera...

Purpose With increased competition under the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) in December 2015, CPA and Tax Auditors are free to export their services within AEC partner countries. Hence, it is crucial that the growing numbers of auditors in the region differentiate themselves by providing superior perceived audit quality and cl...

The full paper can be downloaded from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326623268_Brave_New_World_Service_Robots_in_the_Frontline Purpose – The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century...

>>> Purpose – The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the 18th century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will...

Cross-disciplinary research recognises humour as an effective communication tool for fostering engagement and positive interpersonal relationships, although inappropriate use can create negative outcomes. Drawing on positive psychology, this study aims to empirically examine the extent to which frontline employee’s (FLE’s) humour usage can influenc...

Purpose This study aims to explore the formation and consequences of a cross-selling initiative climate, as well as how a service climate, which provides an important boundary condition, affects both its formation and its ultimate impact on service-sales performance. This article identifies two important predictors of a cross-selling initiative cl...

Purpose – The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, bigdata and biometrics will...

Purpose Crowdsourcing delivers creative ideas for the issuing firm, but participants’ engagement in the creative process also creates additional benefits to firms and participating customers. The purpose of this study is to investigate if these spill-over values endure over time. With data from two time point, i.e. at submission and after announce...

Purpose In today’s global marketplace, the mantra of many service firms is enhanced efficiency and productivity. To increase their bottom line, firms must also expand revenue. They thus face the challenge of ways to increase revenue through customer satisfaction while also achieving productivity gains. The current study offers insight into the rol...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a loss of face on the psychological well-being of frontline employees (FLEs) in an Eastern cultural context (Thailand) when subjected to customer aggression. Importantly, it adopts a contingency approach and examines moderating effects by which social status, a “customer is always right...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the motivation for the 1999 paper “The impact of communication effectiveness and service quality on relationship commitment in consumer, professional services”. In doing so, it is argued that today, the importance and relevance of effective interpersonal communications to managing client relations...

Prior self-service technology (SST) studies focus primarily on the initial adoption and its drivers. However, the long-term viability and success of an SST depend on regular and frequent usage. Therefore, this study draws on social psychology and information system/information technology literature to investigate the habit of SST usage and its driv...

There is compelling evidence that incidents of customer rage are on the rise and not just in Western, individualistic societies. Changing social and economic conditions in collectivist societies (e.g., emerging consumerism and rising wealth in China) have spawned the emergence of customer rage in Eastern countries. To this end, we examine how custo...

Purpose This study aims to examine the extent to which switching costs moderates the impact of trust, value and attractiveness of alternatives on client repatronage intentions. Design/methodology/approach The study combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies to create a cross-sectional survey covering four geographic regions in Thailand. A...

Purpose – This research aims to examine the cognitive appraisals of frontline employees (FLEs) when dealing with aggressive customers and the impact on their well-being, as well as several moderator effects, in a collectivist, Eastern culture. Design/methodology/approach – A critical incident technique reveals the cognitive appraisal of FLEs who h...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explicate professionals’ giving backstory, identifying what motivates and hinders professionals’ undertaking of pro bono service activities. Examples are provided of different pro bono giving styles, as professionals struggle to resolve inter-institutional tensions, thus addressing this little understood ye...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how the motivation and ability of individual employees to sell influences their units’ capability to align their service delivery with sales in a way that satisfies customers. It also addresses the potential influence of employees’ confidence in their supervisor’s ability to sell, such that they predict a joint...

The focus of this study was on Australian consumer perceptions towards Taiwanese personal computer hardware products. This comparative analysis is conducted, with reference to personal computer products originating from seven countries.

Asia-Pacific and Australian adaptation of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy

Operational efficiency is a central goal of service firms. The past decade witnessed the replacement of people with IT systems in service industries, yet the spotlight recently shifted to how frontline employees (FLEs) might perform a dual role by achieving sales and service goals simultaneously. This study examines the predictive ability of three...

Unlike prior research that has confined customer rage to a single point in time, this article explores the unfolding of rage over three time periods, at the initial service failure (Episode 1) and two ineffective service recovery attempts (Episodes 2 and 3). In each episode, we examine the association between loss, or a threat of loss, of personal...

This article critically analyses how clients who have limited professional financial qualifications and experience evaluate the quality of highly customized, complex, intangible professional service such as financial audits. As the financial and business outcomes of an audit only become manifest over time, clients have difficulty in evaluating its...

Siam Suspension Innovation Co. Ltd. (SSI) in 2004 manufactured the first local brand of shock absorber for motor cycles (GAZI brand) in Thailand. This case documents how several entrepreneurs with a passion for motorcycles grasped an opportunity to invent, manufacture and successfully brand a decorative shock absorber for the ubiquitous motorcycle...

Recent years have witnessed increased use of self-service technologies (SSTs) across the services sector, which has dramatically changed the nature of the service delivery process. Although an abundance of research has investigated how customers evaluate a new SST and what drives the initial adoption, little is known about how customers interact wi...

The back-story of customer rage, that is, what is behind a rage episode, specifically the customer's cognitive appraisal processes that trigger extreme negative emotions, and the customer's background (culture) is not well understood. This study involving 435 adult customers, investigates over two time periods (Episode 1: initial failure, and Episo...

Frontline employees in traditional customer service units are under increasing pressure to pursue the twin goals of providing quality service while achieving productivity gains by meeting increased sales targets—that is, being service-sales ambidextrous. Drawing from literature on organizational ambidexterity, this study explores forces that facili...

Purpose The purpose of this empirical paper is to explore for the first time, in a temporal sequence of events framework, how the various forms of justice (procedural, interactional and outcome) impact on customer satisfaction with service recovery. Design/methodology/approach Employing scenarios, an experimental design was employed with data coll...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore situational influences on customers' actual choice between self-service and personal service and to examine the impact of past experiences on self-service technology (SST) attitudes and behavior. Design/methodology/approach – A supermarket self-checkout machine is the SST under investigation. A mixe...

Consumer attitudes towards the quality of Australian-made products in general, and clothing apparel in particular, were investigated. Country of origin ("Made in...") effects were analysed for apparel products from Australia plus four other countries or regions, namely: New Zealand, the United Kingdom, China and other Southeast Asian countries. Res...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to empirically test and extend knowledge of the determinants of customer‐oriented behavior (COB) of service providers in an affective, high contact service setting (healthcare). Design/methodology/approach The authors examine the relative effects of dispositional variables (e.g. personality of service provider)...

Asia-Pacific and Australian adaptation of Services Marketing: People, Technology, Strategy

This article explores customer rage from both customer and employee perspectives (1) identifying and defining the nature of customer rage emotion experiences, expressions, and behaviours as triggered by service failure encounters; and (2) developing and testing measurement scales for customer rage emotions (CRE), expressions (CRX), and behaviours (...

The authors employ cognitive appraisal theory to examine in both Eastern (Thailand) and Western (US) context, how customers perceive threats or losses (psychological and economic/ financial) during service failure situations. We examine what specific service failure circumstances lead to different cognitive appraisals. Five dimensions of cognitive...

Ambidexterity refers to an organizations capacity to achieve two seemingly conflicting goals simultaneouslyin this study, the ability of customer-facing employees to achieve sales and service goals at the same time. We examine a range of organizational contextual variables (i.e. empowerment, team support, fairness of rewards, and transformational l...

In this paper, we examine the impact of various configurations of regulatory fit on the attitudes, exercise intentions and actual behavior of members of a health club loyalty program. Regulatory fit is conceptualized as both the match between types of program rewards and how they are communicated, as well as the congruence between reward types and...

The purpose of this study is to empirically test and extend our knowledge of the determinants of customer-oriented behaviour of front-line employees across a range of service settings. We examine the need for front-line employees to be both ‘willing’ (engaged) and ‘able’ (confidence in their ability) in order to deliver high-quality customer servic...

The astounding growth and expansion of Starbucks is outlined, both on a global scale and within Australia. The focus then shifts to the abrupt closure of three-quarters of the Australian stores in mid 2008. Several reasons for these closures are described and examined, including that: Starbucks overestimated their points of differentiation and the...

Road rage, school rage, and customer rage are becoming almost everyday occurrences. Customer rage is an intense anger coupled with expressions of physical, verbal, or other potentially harmful behaviors in response to a dissatisfying service experience. It can potentially result in severe negative consequences for firms, employees, and even other v...

This case study examines in detail the factors responsible for the emergence of a highly successful South-east Asian brand – MK Restaurants. MK restaurants is a privately owned company that has grown from humble beginnings to a chain of over 250 restaurants in Thailand and tasted success in expanding into Europe and Japan. Our analysis suggest that...

Purpose The paper reports the results of a four-nation study of the relationship between collectivism and social influence in the consumer buying decision, between and within countries. Hypotheses were investigated that revolve around the notion that the more collectivist the person's orientation, the more susceptible the person will be to social i...

In this research, we examine customer rage-associated emotions, expressions, and behaviors following service failure. Three independent studies involving 656 respondents and multiple methods are employed to investigate customer rage. Scales for each form of rage emotion, expression, and behavior were developed and used to assess their interrelation...

Purpose Nurses in hospital settings are a primary contact point and the way their behaviors are perceived by patients is a critical determinant of overall patient satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test and extend knowledge of the determinants of customer‐oriented behavior (COB) of contact personnel in a high‐contact service...

Drawing from the resource-based view and a contingency approach, the authors develop and test a model of the antecedents of client-perceived value in the context of international, professional business-to-business services (consultants, engineers, project management, IT consultants, etc.) in a developing economies setting. Further, we examine the e...

To investigate a firm's propensity to continue internationalization, the so-called Uppsala internationalization process model is a logical point of departure (Johanson & Vahlne, 1977, 1990). Building upon a behavioral theory of the firm (Cyert & March, 1963) and Penrose's (1959) theory of the growth of the firm, the basic logic of the Uppsala or U-...

Purpose Customers' judgment of service quality is by and large based on their evaluation of personal experiences during the service encounter. The purpose of this study is to investigate from a customer perspective, the impact of familiarity (of the individual service provider) and cultural orientation on evaluations of both successful and failed s...

Export performance models anchored in the industrial organization and resource-based theories have previously been developed and tested. Thus far there have been no empirically tested export performance models that have reflected the core tenets of the relational, or behavioral, paradigm. Drawing from relational exchange theory, a model that includ...

With the framework of psychological stress and coping theory, the authors explore service failures incidents that result in extreme negative emotions and rage behaviors. Using critical incident technique and an interpretative approach, this study conduct 50 depth interviews in four countries and explore the range of emotions, expressions and behavi...

Increasingly, companies are using the licensing approach to acquire external technology as an alternative to internal new product development. However, the licensing literature presents lists of benefits and costs without identifying either their relative importance or the underlying dimensions. This article presents the results of a survey of Aust...

Purpose – While numerous published works have extensively examined customer retention models and even motives for loyalty, none to date has systematically examined which consumer segments are more or less predisposed to exhibit loyal behaviour in a services context. The purpose of this study is to examine whether loyalty behavior and loyalty motive...

It is now well recognized that an effective service recovery program is essential to generating customer satisfaction and loyalty. A number of studies have investigated the impact of service recovery efforts (compensation, speed of response, etc) on post-recovery satisfaction. However, despite the importance of global markets, none have examined th...

This paper aims to establish a conceptual understanding of customer engagement. Drawing from management, marketing, applied psychology literature and marketing practitioners' views, an initial working definition of customer engagement was formed. Customer engagement describes the level of a customer's various "presence" in their relationship with t...

Despite the growing importance of service exports in the world economy, there is limited research into the unique success factors in this sector. This article reports the key lessons from 17 Australian exporters of knowledge-based services (e.g., market research, legal, advertising, engineering) that conduct business in Southeast Asia. The authors...

Purpose To highlight the relative importance of service‐specific export performance drivers that help successful exporting. Design/methodology/approach A gap between the antecedents of manufacturing and service firms was identified via an extensive review on the export performance as well as services literature. Taking the resource‐based view and...

As business continues to globalize, firms are increasingly looking to international business partnerships (IBP) as a means of expanding and competing in new markets. However, many of these partnerships fail. The causes of these failures have often been attributed to managers' inability to form and maintain successful relationships with their partne...

The increasing globalization of business provides a compelling reason for understanding the cultural context of consumer behavior. The research reported here examines the impact of culture on consumers’ perceptions of service recovery efforts. In particular, we studied in an experimental setting, across East–West cultures, the combined effects of e...

The globalization of business has created increased opportunities for the export of a wide range of services. However to date, no study has examined the attitudes, motives and characteristics that propel some service firms to embark on an internationalization path. This study of three hundred and fifty Australian service enterprises examines percep...

Numerous studies have shown customer satisfaction to be the crucial antecedent of perhaps the most important constructs in marketing – loyalty and customer retention. However the satisfaction?customer retention linkage is not as simple as it might first seem. This study examines the impact of switching barriers as potential moderators of the satisf...

This study develops and tests a model of effective interpersonal communication as an antecedent to client trust and closeness amongst small to medIum enterprises(SME) professional services providers - personal financial planners. A new multidimensional scale for interpersonal communications is developed and tested, resulting in the identification o...

As in other social exchanges, cultural norms and values are likely to influence customers’ perceptions of fairness and satisfaction with the service recovery process. This study contrasts the impact of two recovery attributes (compensation and explanation) on customers’ postrecovery perceptions in a cross-cultural context (East-Asia versus United S...

This study examines the important and often underestimated role that switching barriers play in the propensity to stay with service providers. Three service types (with different structural characteristics) were studied across two diverse cultures—Australia (Western, individualistic culture) and Thailand (Eastern, collectivist culture). Six potenti...

Revenue management is a sophisticated form of supply and demand management that helps a firm maximise revenue by balancing pricing and inventory controls. In recent years, an increasing number of firms have recognised the importance of revenue management in their ability to increase sales and profitability. When a firm that is fundamentally custome...

The present study investigates the propensity to continue internationalization by experienced international service providers. Enhancing the cognitive-behavioral root of internationalization process theory (Johanson and Vahlne 1977; 1990), this paper builds upon Ajzen’s (1991) theory of planned behavior. Consistent with the latter theory, the prope...

Recent work in personality psychology has related various enduring traits with affective experiences or states (e.g., satisfaction). The research reported in this paper depicts the results of an empirical study examining the impact of key personality constructs: extraversion, agreeableness and variety seeking tendency on the satisfaction - trust -...

Madsen synthesized international performance studies and identified 20 performance antecedents. Of these, 12 are unrelated to international performance or have conflicting relationships across the reviewed studies. We use his recommendations to increase the value of international performance research. First, we include seven antecedents that cover...

Because service encounters and service relationships are first and foremost social encounters, norms and expectations related to such encounters are likely to vary from culture to culture, but especially between high context Eastern, collectivist and low context, Western individualistic cultures. The purpose of this study was, in part, to replicate...

This study examines for the first time, antecedents of relationship commitment in service industries in an Eastern cultural context. The study investigates the reasons for customers engaging in long-term relational exchanges with service firms, as well as the impact of attractive alternatives and switching costs on such relationships. The sample co...

Satisfaction is a well established outcome of a successful service encounter, and increasingly satisfaction is being linked to perhaps the most important construct in marketing-behavioral loyalty. In this paper satisfaction as the dependent variable is regressed on technical quality and functional quality, as independent variables. However, the stu...

To date, empirical and conceptual models of relationship marketing have focused almost exclusively on a range of direct antecedents and mediator variables to explain variations in a dependent variable – usually relationship commitment. No attempt has been made to examine under what conditions these various antecedents have a stronger/weaker impact...

Studies modeling customer satisfaction have often produced conflicting findings, prompting some scholars to suggest that satisfaction may vary under different product and situational conditions. This longitudinal study of business-to-business professional services (management consulting services) examines the moderating effects of two individual-le...

Consumers the world over are becoming more homogeneous thanks to the unifying forces of travel, media, technology, information transfer and the like. Furthermore, today customers have higher expectations than ever before regarding the quality of service they should receive from a wide range of service organisations (professional as well as non-prof...

Consumers the world over are becoming more homogeneous thanks to the unifying forces of travel, media, technology, information transfer and the like. Furthermore, today customers have higher expectations than ever before regarding the quality of service they should receive from a wide range of service organisations (professional as well as non-prof...

Over the last few weeks, Ken Ashley Jr. has been following the international news with great interest and has been worrying about some of the pictures he saw on TV News bulletins from his Sydney office. It is extremely rare that Ken affords himself time to watch TV while he is working since he spends more time outside than inside his office. But th...

What makes an international business partnership successful? While it is accepted in the literature that relational exchange theory has a pivotal role to play in marketing, little research has been done to determine its impact in an international setting. By synthesising six complementary theories on inter-firm relationships and some initial findin...

This study of consumer professional services examines the role of experience in the development of service satisfaction with the personal financial planning services firm. Product experience possessed by the client moderates the interlinkages between service satisfaction and its two antecedents-performance and relational behaviour. The results of s...

The pivotal role of services in international business is now receiving widespread recognition. Furthermore, the global marketplace is being increasingly characterised by the speed and ease with which such services cross national boundaries. This exploratory study of Australian and Dutch service exporters provides, for the first time, an understand...

In the 1990s, the global marketplace is characterized by the speed and ease with which services cross over national boundaries. As a result, service industries in many countries around the world have become extremely important in the development and socioeconomic well-being of these countries. The purpose of this paper is to understand the internat...

This research explores the nature and determinants of choice set structure in high-technology business markets. Specifically, we examine the antecedents of both choice set size and the proportion of out-suppliers included in the choice set of 273 organizations that had recently made a major purchase of telecommunications or computer equipment. Our...

Most previous research in the domain of relationship marketing has focused on the antecedents of loyalty and commitment in industrial markets, distribution channels or consumer goods. This study, however, models the antecedents of clients’ relationship commitment in the context of a professional service, high in credence qualities (where customers...