Relationship Quality Scale

What it measures

Measures the overall quality of the relationship between a customer and a service provider across three foundational dimensions. Trust captures the customer's confidence in the service provider's reliability, integrity, and benevolence — the belief that the provider will act in the customer's best interest. Commitment captures the customer's desire to maintain and invest in the relationship — an enduring motivation to continue engaging with the provider. Satisfaction captures the customer's cumulative affective evaluation of the service relationship over time. Relationship quality is a higher-order construct that integrates trust, commitment, and satisfaction and is a stronger predictor of customer retention, share of wallet, and referral behaviour than any single component alone. Based on Morgan & Hunt's (1994) Commitment-Trust Theory of relationship marketing.

Response format

Likert (1–5, strongly disagree to strongly agree)

Scale items

Trust — confidence in the partner's reliability and integrity (Likert 1–7, strongly disagree to strongly agree)

• I trust [service provider/salesperson] completely.
• [Service provider] is someone I can rely on to keep promises.
• [Service provider] is honest in their dealings with me.
• I feel confident that [service provider] has my best interests in mind.

Commitment — desire to maintain the relationship

• I am committed to maintaining my relationship with [service provider].
• My relationship with [service provider] is something I intend to maintain indefinitely.
• I feel a strong sense of loyalty to [service provider].
• I am willing to make short-term sacrifices to maintain this relationship.

Satisfaction — overall positive evaluation of the relationship

• I am satisfied with the relationship I have with [service provider].
• The relationship I have with [service provider] meets my expectations.
• I am pleased with my relationship with [service provider].
• Overall, my relationship with [service provider] has been a good one.

Full scale items shown. Always cite the original source when using this scale in research.

Usage notes & scoring

Three subscale scores; a second-order Relationship Quality composite score can also be computed. Trust is the most foundational dimension — without trust, commitment and satisfaction cannot sustain the relationship through service failures. Commitment is the strongest predictor of share of wallet and active referral behaviour. Widely used in banking, insurance, healthcare, professional services, and retail relationship marketing research.

Recommended companion scales

Citation

Hennig-Thurau, T., & Klee, A. (1997). The impact of customer satisfaction and relationship quality on customer retention: A critical reassessment and model development. Psychology & Marketing, 14(8), 737–764.

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