Toward addressing customer migration: measuring B2B salespersons' perceptions of customer ownership

PurposeOne of the pivotal questions facing all firms is "Who owns the customer?" Despite the longstanding acknowledgment that customer ownership is critical to a firm's success, to date, little research attention has been afforded to conceptualizing and measuring customer ownership. This study aims to address this research gap by exploring, measuring and validating a customer ownership scale through the lens of the business-to-business salesperson.Design/methodology/approachThe classical multi-item scale development involving a multistep process was used in developing and validating this scale measuring customer ownership. Using a grounded theory approach, the customer ownership scale is developed and justified as distinctive from customer loyalty.FindingsThe two-factor customer ownership scale reflects the underlying factors of the salesperson-customer bond and provides a pathway to empirically assess mechanisms for addressing customer migration. The findings suggest an opportunity for greater precision in both meaning and measurement for both academics and practitioners.Originality/valueThe question "Who owns the customer?" has been a venerable enigma in sales organizations, and it remains an underdeveloped construct in sales and marketing research. This research empirically explores the construct of customer ownership in a systematic manner that is conspicuously absent from extant studies.