The effects of industry knowledge on the development of trust in service relationships

Trust is a key factor in the establishment of long-term relationships between business suppliers and their clients. The development of trust is particularly important within service industries because of the abstract nature of most service products. Prior research has documented that both "personality-related" (e.g., empathy, politeness, and customer/service representative similarity) and "performance-related" (customization, competence, reliability, and promptness) service representative characteristics have an impact upon trust in the service provider. However, the relative importance of these characteristics, and in some cases the direction of their relationships with trust, has varied across studies. In this paper, we posit a contingency model of trust, suggesting that the effects of the above variables on trust are moderated by a customer's knowledge of, or familiarity with, the service industry in question. Our model is tested in a business-to-business context by means of mail surveys involving a large sample of small business owners. The small business owners provided data about their relationships with their health insurance, management consulting, telecommunications, or travel industry service providers. Our results demonstrate how service representatives and firms can work toward the establishment of trust with their clients under varying market conditions. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.