Fundamentals of customer engagement

: for veterinarian healthcare providers in Portugal

Abstract

This research provides a validated scale measuring an adjusted version of Kumar & Pansari’s (2016) customer engagement (CE) scale. These adjustments to the original scale involved: (1) the splitting of the customer influence subscale into two separate ones, namely, customer influence with strong ties and customer influence with weak ties; and (2) the exclusion of the customer referral (incentivized) behavior dimension. The provided CE scale was developed and validated for veterinary healthcare providers operating in Portugal. This research adopts therefore the view of CE as a set of customer activities that individually contribute to firm performance along 4 dimensions: (i) customer purchases, (ii) customer knowledge, (iii) customer influence with strong ties, and (iv) customer influence with weak ties. The adjusted CE scale test and validation relied on a sample of 296 customers of a particular veterinary healthcare group, OneVet Group, currently the market leader in Portugal. Complementary to the validation survey, respondents’ individual sociodemographic and purchasing information was also retrieved from the firm’s database. The major findings were that the resulting validated scale with 16 items is highly reliable (a=.942) and has very good sampling adequacy values (KMO=.933; p<.000), explaining 84% of the total data variation. The results were also cluster analysed on respondents’ CE subscales’ scores which resulted on 3 major distinct CE profiles: (i) with high tendency to perform all types of CE activities, (ii) with low tendency to perform any type of CE activities, and (iii) with high tendency to perform purchases, but not the three remaining CE activities. Additionally, the clusters’ average recency, frequency, monetary value (RFM) scores and variances were compared, however, no significant evidence was found regarding the relationship between CE behaviours and RFM indices, i.e. customers' past
purchases. This research provides therefore a reliable and significant scale that fits the
particularities of veterinary healthcare providers in Portugal, enabling them to
accurately assess the connectedness among customers and with firms. Further,
the present study also suggests several options for customer segmentation
analyses in CE terms so that firms are able to identify customers’ profiles and
develop adapted strategies to maximise their contribution to firm performance.