The effect of customer orientation on financial performance in service firms: The mediating role of service innovation

In service firms, customer orientation and service innovativeness are the important strategic features to pledge sustainable wealth and growth for financial performance. Focusing on customer means, companies must have rigorous knowledge and understanding of customer needs, expectations, and demands. To satisfy those demands and expectations, new products and/or services need to be carefully designed. Customer orientation involves the introduction of something new or different in response to market conditions and can be perceived as an important driver for innovation. The literature on innovation in services demonstrates that this territory is still under-investigated. Our study is an attempt to slightly complement this shortcoming by empirically solving several issues related to service firms. In particular, we propose the service innovativeness as a mediating effect in the relationship between customer orientation and financial performance. A theoretical research model was investigated via structural equation modeling (SEM) using 686 survey responses from the service industry. The findings of the structural equation model indicated that customer orientation is positively related to financial performance and service innovativeness respectively. And service innovativeness was found as a partial mediating effect, which means that the service innovativeness intervenes for some part but not all of the relationships between customer orientation and financial performance.