An empirical research of consulting as a service(caas) on customers’ satisfaction and continuation based on an extended expectation-confirmation model

Abstract

Consulting as a Service is growing rapidly all over the world, and especially in Finland. Many big companies utilise the help of external developers in order to build reliable and high quality solutions. In order to concentrate on what is valuable for the customer an important relationship different customer-company interactions should be found. That will help companies to concentrate on the points that customers value and improve in these fields in the future.

The goal of this thesis is to build an extended expectation confirmation model (ECM) as the main research model and to utilise it for the collected data. In order to find out the constructs to be used within the ECM, systematic literature review is conducted and after the constructs are counted by number of times mentioned in other papers. Appendix consists of the list of primary studies selected for the literature review and in the thesis there is a table with the calculated constructs and in which paper they are mentioned. After that the final research model is built with the most valuable constructs for the company from the most frequently used constructs.

The results of the research supported such hypotheses as social influence has a positive effect on satisfaction, social influence has a positive effect on trust and satisfaction has a positive effect on trust. While the following hypotheses are not supported: trust has a positive influence on continuance intention, service quality has a positive influence on satisfaction, and service quality has a positive influence on trust. The more detailed description can be found in the discussion part.