MANAGING CUSTOMERS: ANALYZING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUSTOMER PERSONALITY, CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND WILLINGNESS TO CREATE WOM

The impact of personality traits on consumer behaviour is always an important concern for marketing researchers and practitioners. Using the theoretical lens of the OCEAN model this paper explores the personality attributes as a set of stimuli that facilitates consumer satisfactory buying experience, resulting in higher willingness to create Word of Mouth (WOM). The data was collected from consumers of different services through the convenience sampling method. The respondents were approached through different online platforms and data from 303 respondents was obtained through Google forms. 19 responses were found unsuitable for further use so the remaining 284 appropriate questionnaires were analyzed through structural equation modelling using AMOS23. The study findings suggest that willingness to create WOM has a positive relationship with customer satisfaction, while customer satisfaction can be driven by extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness attributes of consumers’ personalities. However, neuroticism and openness to experience showed an insignificant impact on customer satisfaction. The study findings guide marketing managers to consider the customer personality aspects mentioned in the OCEAN model to enhance customer satisfaction and try to obtain positive WOM from customers. This paper investigates the in-depth knowledge on the practicality of the OCEAN model concerning customer satisfaction coupled with customer willingness to create WOM.


INTRODUCTION
The biggest challenge for the service industry players is that their offerings are intangible in nature and cannot be evaluated before consumers experience these services (Ng et al., 2011).
Buying a service seems to be riskier than any tangible product, so Dwivedi et al. (2021) suggested that the recommendation from service users are taken more truly by consumers.
Literature indicates that consumers consider WOM as a more reliable medium than traditional media and almost 50% of consumers consider WOM as a critical factor for decision making in buying products/services (Dulek & Aydin, 2020). Consumer pays more attention to other consumers' feedback rather than trusting the communication made by the service providers (Nieto et al., 2014). The significance of WOM on consumer purchase decisions and retention is well recognized by the industry.
A wide range of studies have been conducted to investigate factors that influence consumer willingness to create WOM and one of the most recognized factors is consumer satisfaction.
According to Kalinic et al. (2020) and Yen and Wang (2020), consumer satisfaction is a vital contributing factor for willingness to create WOM. Service industries capitalize heavily in efforts to achieve consumer satisfaction that reinforces willingness to create WOM, resulting in the long term profitability of the industries (Cheng et al., 2021). Despite numerous research works the key drivers of consumers' satisfaction in the service industry are still need to be clarified. It becomes more important to understand these factors as dissatisfied consumers are probably having a negative influence on the industry's bottom line (Tajuddin & Nayan, 2020).
Thus, the path to consumers' willingness to create WOM does not begin with satisfaction, but rather with the drivers of satisfaction such as consumer's personality traits; a key driver of buying behaviour (Smith, 2020;Orji et al., 2017;Sofi & Nika, 2016). by consumers. According to Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955), WOM is seven times more effective than newspaper and magazine advertising, four times more effective than personal selling and twice as radio advertising. WOM enhances the consumers buying intention by reducing the fear of trying out a new product (Olufemi & Dastane, 2016).

Factors influencing consumers' willingness to create WOM
The existing literature suggests that several factors may have an impact on consumer's willingness to create WOM. According to Hajli et al. (2014) consumers, the purchase decision is very much influence by the trust in the service provider, inspiring them to create WOM. The brand commitment restricts the buyers from brand switching and initiating repeat purchases, enhancing the will to create WOM (Han & Ryu, 2012). The social influence of WOM is also a significant factor to push customers to create WOM, as being a social phenomenon, reviews from customers are considered more dependable and reliable (Fang, 2014).
Price sensitive consumers were found to be more engaged in creating WOM, as they are inclined to obtain the best value for money by evaluating different alternatives (Kursan Milakovic & Mihic, 2016). In high-risk buying scenarios, consumers are more dependent on WOM, so they are ultimately willing to create WOM for high perceived risk products (Alsulaiman et al., 2015). Demographic variables were also found to have an impact on willingness to create WOM; women are more interested to spread WOM than men (Loureiro & Ribeiro, 2014), younger people are more involved in WOM seeking and spreading behaviour than older people (Schiffman et al., 2012). Customer satisfaction was recognized as a prime factor influencing customer's willingness to create WOM. According to Kalinic et al. (2020), satisfied customers are more willing to share their experience with others hence generating WOM.

Consumer Satisfaction
According to Putro et al. (2014), customer satisfaction is defined as an assessment of consumers' feelings and emotions for the use of products and services, where the performance meets the customers' expectations. Customer satisfaction can be a leading element of customer willingness to create WOM, as numerous empirical studies proved linkage among satisfaction, trust, commitment, and WOM (Back & Lee, 2009;Ladhari 2007). The significant influence of WOM on consumers' purchasing behaviour is evident and most of the practitioners are inclined to include WOM in their marketing strategies (Kim et al., 2016).

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Volume 3, Issue 2, July 2021 Consumer satisfaction is a prime antecedent of positive WOM (Liang & Wang, 2007). Swan and Oliver (1989) said that satisfied customers are more often engaged in generating WOM than unsatisfied customers. Positive WOM created by customers have a positive impact on consumer preference, ultimately giving a good opportunity to the firms to increase their market share (Casalo et al., 2008). Strategically, WOM cannot be controlled by the firms and it is originated by the consumers themselves, thus directly related with the consumers' satisfaction to boost consumers' willingness to create WOM (Ranaweera & Prabhu, 2003).

Hypothesis 1: Consumer satisfaction has a positive impact on consumer willingness
to create word of mouth

Personality Traits
The prime objective of the marketers is to enhance and sustain customers' satisfaction but knowing the customers' response to the marketing efforts is key to attain this objective (Rexha, 2000). According to psychology, human behaviour can be studied through personality traits (Costa & McCrae, 1992), which helps in understanding customers' responses to the marketing strategy. Personality is the reflection of stable and distinct thought patterns, behaviour and emotions to various life situations (Parks-Leduc et al., 2015). Different trait theories of personality have explained that what personality traits exist. In earlier theories, numerous possible traits were suggested, like Gordon Allport's list of 4,000 personality traits, Raymond Cattell's 16 personality factors, and Hans Eysenck's three-factor theory. The critic of Cattell's theory was its complexity and Eysenck's theory had very restricted scope. This resulted in the emergence of a well-acknowledged five-factor theory describing fundamental traits of personality.
The theory confirmation started to form the work of Fiske (1949) and was later extended by Norman (1967), Smith (1967), Goldberg (1981), and McCrae and Costa (1987 (Weele, 2013). When compared with closed individuals, open individuals tend to experience more new things (Rossberger, 2014) and prefer to try more variety (Bozionelos et al., 2014). On the other hand, routine behaviour is followed by closed individuals (Turkyilmaz et al., 2015). In different researches, it was found that people showing high innovative and variety-seeking behaviour were early adopters of new products and services (Adjei & Clark, 2010;Yeboah, 2018).
Openness to experience trait has a positive impact on job and career satisfaction (Mehrad et al., 2015), likewise, life satisfaction was also found to be dependent on this trait (Heidemeier & Goritz, 2016). Life satisfaction and openness to experiences were found to have a positive significant relationship in students' life (Ali, 2019). In a study, Lin (2010)

Hypothesis 2:
Openness to experience has a positive impact on consumer satisfaction.

Conscientiousness
A conscientious person can be described as responsible, organized, trustworthy, selfdisciplined, punctual, thoughtful, and result oriented (Weele, 2013). People showing high on this trait are found to interact with others effectively (Ekinci & Dawes, 2009) and are interested to have enduring relationships (Turkyilmaz et al., 2015). Conscientious people are advance planners and proactive (McCrae & Costa, 2003), and aspire to be well informed (Mondak, 2010). Being constructive personality trait conscientiousness potentially has a positive impact on consumer buying practices. Customers having a high conscientiousness level show a better buying experience, leading towards a higher satisfaction level (Smith, 2020).
In a study related to the quality of relationships among co-workers, Organ and Lingl (1995) pointed out the negative relationship between conscientiousness and satisfaction.
Conscientious leaders were found to be more rigid, resulting from low satisfaction of followers

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[311] (Harris et al., 2019). Interestingly studies suggest that there is an adverse aspect of conscientiousness on human wellbeing, as more conscientious individuals were found to be less satisfied in their lives (Boyce et al., 2010). According to Yoo and Gretzel (2011), conscientious individuals are likely to create WOM after they have pondered on the potential outcomes of creating it. Conscientious people make themselves feel good by creating WOM, as it positively influences their self-enhancement as a motivation to create WOM.  (Jani & Han, 2014), similarly, in the patients, it was found that extrovert patients expressed higher life and customer satisfaction (Proctor & Best, 2019). In recent literature, it was stated that service professionals' job satisfaction was mainly determined by the extroversion dimension (Mróz & Kaleta, 2016). According to Yoo and Gretzel (2011), extroverted individuals are motivated to create WOM as they gain energy from communicating in public.

Agreeableness
Persons scoring better on this trait are sincere, compassionate, supportive, cooperative, and caring, while persons scoring lower on this trait are harsh, arrogant, stubborn, and irritable (Costa & McCrae, 1992). Agreeable individuals tend to interact with others (Mondak, 2010) and these kinds of individuals are more inclined towards forming enhanced interpersonal relationships (Mooradian & Swan, 2006;Barrick & Mount, 1991 (2014) reported that guests scoring high on agreeableness trait were more often satisfied with the services in comparison with guests having low scores. Similarly, in the mobile phone services industry, the agreeableness personality trait was acknowledged as the distinct factor influencing customer satisfaction among the five core personality traits (Siddiqui, 2012). Individuals high on the agreeable trait have a high concern for others and this motivates them to create WOM, benefiting consumers and service providers Wang and colleagues (2012).

Hypothesis 5:
Agreeableness has a positive impact on consumer satisfaction.

Neuroticism
An individual's desire to stay away from accountability in any situation comes under the definition of Neuroticism (Haq et al., 2010). These types of individuals are unstable, depressed, and anxious (Yoo & Gretzel, 2011)  It is generally considered that individuals with neuroticism are negatively prone to consumption behaviours (Jani & Han, 2014;Volodina et al., 2019). Hlatywayo et al. (2013) have stated that negative relation exists between neuroticism and satisfaction, similarly, a study conducted in the context of banking services found that the trait of neuroticism indirectly influences customer satisfaction when mediated by negative affect (Ciunova-Shuleska & Palamidovska-Sterjadovska, 2019). Moreover, the negative influence was exerted by the guests who were high pitched in neuroticism, leading to lower satisfaction with the services of the hotel industry (Jani & Han, 2014).
Neurotic individuals consider that WOM is useless, enforcing them to restrict their feelings to create WOM (Correa et al., 2010). This trait also has a negative influence on concern for others so they are reluctant to help or warn other consumers (Yoo & Gretzel, 2011).

Hypothesis 6:
Neuroticism has a negative impact on consumer satisfaction.

Data and Sample
Being a quantitative study, this research followed the deductive approach to examine the impact of personality traits on consumer satisfaction and willingness to create WOM. The data was collected from the consumers using services from banking, education, health, restaurants, and the telecommunication sector. The consumers who were easily approachable were contacted for data collection, so the method used for data collection was convenience sampling.
The online version of the questionnaire was sent to the respondents through SMS, WhatsApp groups and social interactive websites. The respondents were given soft reminders wherever possible, in 47 days, 392 respondents answered the online questionnaire meeting the criteria of (Krejcie & Morgan, 1970 In the survey response data, 54.1% of respondents were male, while 45.9% were female.
Almost 75% of respondents were between 18 to 34 years old. More than 90 % of respondents were having bachelors or master degrees. Almost half of the respondents were earning less than Rs. 50,000 /month as mentioned in Table 1.

Measures
In this study, all the measurement instruments were taken from the previous literature with minor adaptations to fit in our study's context. Personality traits were described by the big five personality traits (OCEAN model). Personality traits were measured by using 44 items scale developed by John, Donahue and Kentle (1991) shown in Appendix A. Customer Satisfaction was measured by three items scale adapted from (Bitner, 1990). To measure willingness to create WOM five items scale was used, developed by Goyette et al. (2010). All the items were measured on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree).

Method of Analysis
The data were analyzed in two steps as proposed by Anderson and Gerbing (1988). The reliability of the measurement constructs used in the study was confirmed by measuring

Results of Measurement Model, Convergent Validity and Discriminant Validity
Initially, the data was used to develop a CFA model to confirm the factor loading of all the constructs used in the study and check the model fitness.  Hu and Bentler (1999) criteria, all the values showed that model fit is good and well above the accepted values. All the items having factor loading less than 0.5 were removed to ensure the internal reliability of the indicators as indicated by Bagozzi & Yi (1991). The validity of the constructs was measured by composite reliability (CR) and average variance extract (AVE) values. All CR coefficients were among 0.77 to 0.92, exceeding the recommended cut off value of 0.7 (Hair et al., 2010). To evaluate the convergent validity of all latent constructs AVE values were calculated and all the values were found greater than the suggested cut-off value of 0.5 (Hair et al., 2010). Moreover, the overall reliability of the construct was confirmed through Cronbach's α, where all the constructs except agreeableness exhibited coefficient value greater than 0.7, showing an adequate level of reliability (Nunnally, 1978). All the results for CR, Cronbach's α and AVE are shown in Table 2.
After ascertaining internal consistency/reliability and convergent validity, the next step was to measure discriminant validity. The discriminant validity was measured by using Fornell and Larcker (1981) criterion. Correlation among the construct was less than the square root of Construct AVE value as shown in table 3, displaying high discriminant validity.

Results of the structural model: Hypotheses Testing
The next step is to test the hypotheses and examine the proposed causal relations among the constructs. The structural model was run on AMOS 21 and bootstrapping procedure with 2000 iterations was executed to enhance the statistical significance of sub-constructs and the path coefficients (Chin et al., 2008). In the study, six hypotheses were proposed. The results show that the first hypothesis, extraversion has a positive impact on consumer satisfaction has been accepted (β=.168; p<.05), consistent with previous studies results (Proctor & Best, 2019;Mróz & Kaleta, 2016). This shows that extrovert consumers would have higher consumer satisfaction and it concludes that as a marketer it's easy to satisfy extrovert consumers than introverts. It was found that the second hypothesis of the study stating that conscientiousness

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[317] has a positive impact on consumer satisfaction has been accepted (β=.288; p<.05). Smith (2020) also found similar results, however contradictory results were reported by Harris et al. (2019). It affirms that consumers with high conscientious levels would show higher consumer satisfaction, supporting the fact that as a marketer it's easy to satisfy consumers who are high in conscientiousness level than consumers who are low in conscientiousness level.
The next hypothesis agreeableness has a positive impact on consumer satisfaction has been accepted (β=.362; p<.05) validating the findings of Jani and Han (2014) and Siddiqui (2012).
This shows that consumers showed higher consumer satisfaction due to the high agreeableness level. It justifies that as a marketer it's easy for a marketer to obtain customer satisfaction when they are targeting consumers exhibiting a high agreeableness level. The fourth hypothesis neuroticism has a negative impact on consumer satisfaction has been rejected (β=.074; p>.05).
The relationship between the variables was found insignificant so it can be concluded that the neuroticism level of the consumer has no significant impact on consumer satisfaction. Although most of the studies including Volodina et al., (2019) stated that negative relation exists between neuroticism and satisfaction. It can be inferred that this personality dimension may not be taken into consideration while designing the marketing mix.
The fifth hypothesis openness has a positive impact on consumer satisfaction has been rejected (β=.088; p>.05). The insignificant relationship reveals that openness to experience might not contribute to obtaining consumer satisfaction. The findings are contrary to Mehrad et al. (2015) and Castillo (2017) who found a positive impact between these variables. The last hypothesis stating that consumer satisfaction has a positive impact on willingness to create WOM has been accepted (β=.735; p<.05). Prior study findings also support this result (Afridi et al., 2014; DOI: 10.52633/jemi.v3i2.79 [318] Taghizadeh et al., 2013). From this result, it can be concluded that satisfied customers would be more willing to create WOM than unsatisfied customers. This is an important finding for the marketers that if they want their customers to create positive WOM for their brand, they need to keep them satisfied.

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
Word of mouth (WOM) has already been recognized by marketers to be a highly credible form of marketing information. The impact generated by WOM has made it important for today's marketers to remain updated about its theory, power, effect and understanding. High involvement of today's consumers over the internet, WOM is gradually becoming a need for marketers and it has positioned itself as a topic which the marketers can't afford to ignore. It is of great importance particularly to the service industries where offerings are fundamentally intangible and require a personalized touch of customer service in order to generate positive reviews from the customers. In marketing, it is believed that a satisfied customer does the best

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[319] advertising, who consciously and sometimes unconsciously becomes a campaigner and a firm's advocate, influencing the views and opinions of potential customers concerning the firm's offering.
In this study, it was focused that how one's personality has an impact on consumer's satisfaction and willingness to create word of mouth. The findings of the study concluded that not all aspects of personality influence consumer satisfaction. Extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness were found to have a positive impact on consumer satisfaction, while neuroticism and openness to experience were found insignificant. Extravert people are very social with confident personalities, having a positive attitude towards life, so it's easy to make them happy and satisfied than an introverted individuals. Their ability to communicate their needs and wishes effectively makes them more expressive than an introvert. Extroverts always gain energy talking in public, so while generating WOM they not only gain reputation and social benefits by engaging themselves in communicating with the public, but also get inner satisfaction.
Conscientious individuals are responsible, consistent, risks avoiders and create timely bonds that last for long and thus they refrain from complaining. These people when receiving consistent services are likely to create WOM. In comparison to less conscientious individuals, conscientious people are willing to create WOM because they comprehend that creating WOM will make them feel good about themselves. Agreeable individuals are more cooperative than less agreeable individuals. They seek cooperation as they are warm, considerate and more concerned with the well-being of others. Higher interpersonal harmony and a sense of belongings with the service provider(s) compel them to create WOM. Implicit higher concerns for others motivate them also to create WOM.
The findings suggested that openness to experience was found to have an insignificant impact on consumers' satisfaction because, in a society like Pakistan, people have a low tendency to experience new things.

FUTURE RECOMMENDATIONS
This research comes with some limitations and subsequent opportunities for further study.
Firstly, because of different social norms and the dependence of WOM on brand category/industry, the findings cannot be generalized to non-services industries. It is proposed that a similar study may be conducted in a different sector to validate the current findings.
In future studies, it may be investigated that how consumers involvement, expertise and demographic homophily have an impact on consumers' satisfaction and willingness to create WOM. Future research could similarly examine moderation effects on the relationship between key constructs and in particular WOM behaviour. The effect of customer demographics such as age, gender, income, frequency of contact, service type, and new versus experienced customers would be a worthwhile avenue for research. Additionally, the use of a self-reporting instrument to measure respondents' personalities might have involved inherent social desirability biases, self-distortion and other psychological barriers affecting the responses.
Although the survey was anonymous, respondents may have scored themselves high on all dimensions conventionally perceived as desirable characteristics. Future researches could employ triangulation by asking significant others to report on an individual's behaviour along with self-report by respondents.

RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS
This study has several implications for the marketers of service industries. On the theoretical end, the findings of this study make a critical contribution to fill the gap in the literature of customers' willingness to create WOM. It provides a profound understanding of the role of personality traits in consumer satisfaction development. The study endorses that the dimensions of personality traits are a substantial factor and exert indirect influence on willingness to create WOM through consumer satisfaction.

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[321] Marketers should not adopt the conventional consumer relationship management strategies to create WOM. Customer satisfaction cannot be obtained among customers uniformly; rather it depends on the personality traits of customers. This study can be detrimental for marketers to understand factors having an impact on consumers' willingness to create WOM, as this study acknowledges the significance of consumer satisfaction as a core consequence of personality traits. This understanding would help them to formulate and implement their marketing strategies and utilizes their limited marketing resources with maximum efficiency. It is suggested that service providing firms should focus more on the consumers with higher extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness traits while selecting the target market.
This finding may also help marketers in developing their advertising strategies. Blogs and discussions forums are the platforms to engage extrovert customers and to provide the opportunity to speak about the firm's products and services publicly, helping them to create WOM. According to psychology conscientiousness, people are more rational and have a higher need for information and updates, so when the marketers engage these consumers by sending brochures, product updates and service satisfaction forms. These consumers feel more satisfied and being a brand ambassador would be more likely to create WOM. Customers high on agreeableness can be targeted by using appropriate celebrities and co-branding activities.

Author(s) Contribution:
The first author contributed to the original conceptual framework and helped in the development of an original manuscript. The second and third authors contributed to data collection and revising the manuscript. Whereas, the fourth author contributed to the development of the discussion & conclusion section and helped in finalizing the final manuscript.