THE IMPACT OF RELATIONSHIP QUALITY AND SELF-SERVICE TECHNOLOGY ON COMPANY PERFORMANCE

While technology boosts company performance and improves customer relationships, automation and customer self-service have put considerable pressure on B2B salespeople. The current paper offers a novel perspective on a rarely studied transactional business-to-business market. The coexisting presence of automated customer self-service and personal selling is explored to offer empirical data regarding the impact of transactional B2B on company performance. The novelty of the current study lies in the fact that the concurrent use of human-to-human and technology-mediated sales systems has scarcely been investigated concurrently. Three hypotheses are derived from transactional cost and social affect theories on responses from 202 professional buyers combined with company data. The results reveal that despite using technology in transactional B2B, the human touch is required in customer relationships. Companies should include salespeople in mediated customer transactions to achieve short-term (e.g., sales) and long-term (e.g., propensity to recommend) goals.