Bruce Cooil, Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management, co-authored a paper that won the Best Practitioner Presentation Award at the 2009 Frontiers in Service Conference held in Honolulu last fall. Cooil was part of a research team conducting a case study of AXA in Belgium, titled “Because Customers Want to, Need to or Ought to: A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of Commitment on Share-of-Wallet.”
Also co-authoring the presentation was Cooil’s former student and Owen graduate Timothy Keiningham, MBA’89, Global Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President of Ipsos Loyalty, a market research company. Other co-authors were Bart Lariviere of Ghent University in Belgium and Lerzan Aksoy of Fordham University.
The Frontiers in Service Conference is a leading annual conference on service research and was hosted this year by the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii. The winning presentation best demonstrates how research is applied to real-world situations and problems.
“The major thing that’s new about this paper is our finding that share-of-wallet is positively associated with changes in the three dimensions of commitment, especially normative commitment,” Cooil says. In other words, by using answers to specific questions about customer attitudes toward the company, it is possible to predict changes in investment habits more accurately. The data is more limited if one only uses information about how satisfied customers are with different aspects of the company’s services.
“We’re looking at what really drives customers’ decisions about putting their money in a particular bank. If you just look at customer satisfaction, you miss a lot of things,” he says. For example, a bank must be attuned to outside forces, such as changes in individual salary levels or family situations.
“The next step is transforming these models into procedures that can be used by the institution to increase its market share,” Cooil says.