The Effect Factors Of Customer Loyalty In Services Context

With the rapid development of the service industry, service companies face on the serious challenge in the competitive environment. The academic researches and the practice experiences have confirmed that it is the real source of the increasing profits for the service companies to construct and keep the loyal customers, and it is related to the success of the service companies. There were too many studies on this field. Even though, the researchers need to study and discuss the emerged new perspectives as the changes of customers' consuming minds and consuming methods, and consequently to fulfill the blank and the blind spots related to customer loyalty.The study divides the literatures about customer loyalty into two research models: the research model about the effect factors of customer loyalty and the research model about the effect and moderating factors of customer loyalty. According to the shortages in the two research models, the study presents three questions and uses three empirical researches to resolve and discuss them. The major contents are including:(1) Based on the theory of customer cognitive structure, the study researches the mechanism of customer personal value influencing on customer loyalty under American Customer Satisfaction Index model. The study employs the SEM to analyze on the customer satisfaction index extended model inserted customer personal value in restaurants service and mobile phone services. The results show that:Customer personal value is one of the indirect effect factors of customer loyalty. It is a mediate factor and affects customer loyalty through customer satisfaction. Customer personal value has a direct influence on customer satisfaction as well as a mediate effect. Customer perceived quality and customer perceived value, which are the two important conceptions in the theory of customer cognitive structure, are the antecedents of customer personal value.(2) The study introduces the safe concept of psychology to understand the relationship between customer perceived risk and customer loyalty, and discusses how customer psychological safe has an effect on customer loyalty. According to the survey on the Internet consuming services from the four aims, the study analyzes on the relationships among customer perceived risk, customer psychological safe and customer loyalty by SEM model. The results show:customer psychological safe is a mediate factor between customer perceived risk and customer loyalty. Customer psychological safe has a direct and mediate influence on customer loyalty. In the environment of Internet services, customer perceived risk has a direct effect on customer psychological safe in Internet affairs and in Internet interpersonal relation. Customer perceived risk affects customer loyalty through customer psychological safe in Internet affairs.(3) The study explores the moderating effects of service nature, switching cost, social relation of customer with service firm and attractiveness of substitutable services on the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty based on a customer survey for the service of super-markets, restaurants and beauty salons. The results by structural equation multi-group analysis show that these moderator variables have significant effects on the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty. Also, service nature has significant interactions with other factors on the relationship.