Customer service has been a topic in marketing and logistics research for many decades. Much of the research was functionally focused and lackd the integration of logistics customer service with the other components of the Marketing Mix (price,product and promotion). In addition many prior studies focused only on a single industry and there is little replication and limited possibilities for generalizability. This shortcoming is alleviated in this research by using a mult-iindustry approach that allows for replication across the samples. The focus of this research was on business-to business relationships in several industries,health care,electronics,plastics,and sporting goods. The goals of the research were to test a general model that across multiple samples and industries and to understand where differences occur. The outcome variables are customer satisfaction and share of business. The result show that the impact of each component of the Marketing mix varies by sample. In no two samples do the same components of marketing mix show a significant impact on customer satisfication.
This does not diminish the importance of marketing mix,but it shows that a careful evaluation of individual samples,but not all them. AS a result of this research future researchers should investigate why differences occer between the samples. Managers should take away that they must perform customer service studies in their own company and that the studies must be repeated in regular intervals.