Customer familiarity and its effects on satisfaction and behavioral intentions

When customer familiarity increases, customer expertise is likely to increase. Although expertise is known to affect information processing in several ways, few studies have examined the effects of familiarity on customers' evaluations and behavioral intentions. In this study, it was found that a high level of prepurchase familiarity was associated with more extreme (i.e., more polarized) postpurchase responses in customer satisfaction, repurchase intentions, and word-of-mouth intentions compared to a low prepurchase level of familiarity. More specifically, when service performance was high, high-familiarity customers expressed a higher level of satisfaction and behavioral intentions than did less familiar customers. On the other hand, when performance was low, high-familiarity customers expressed lower levels of satisfaction and behavioral intentions than did low-familiarity customers. (C) 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.