The role of interpersonal communication in developing small-medium size enterprise (SME) client loyalty toward an audit firm

This article critically analyses how clients who have limited professional financial qualifications and experience evaluate the quality of highly customized, complex, intangible professional service such as financial audits. As the financial and business outcomes of an audit only become manifest over time, clients have difficulty in evaluating its technical worth. Consequently, it is critical to explore what motivates client likelihood of re-engaging an audit firm. This study of 519 small-firm clients of financial audit firms in Thailand demonstrats that, consistent with signaling theory, the quality of interpersonal communication, rather than technical quality, has the greatest impact on client perceptions of value-for-fee and, importantly, the likelihood of re-engaging the audit firm in the future.