A Study On The Relationship Of Customer Participation, Relationship Quality And Customer Loyalty

As market competition increased in the service industry, more and more enterprises realized the value of customer loyalty. Loyal customers are the main source of profit, therefore, improving the relationship quality and customer loyalty has become an important winning strategy. In addition, the scholars provide management recommendations for the service enterprises by studying the factors of customer loyalty. So, the theory of customer loyalty in service industry has become a forefront topic of marketing researches.An important feature of service is the production and consumption at the same time, then the customer participation is inevitable. Domestic and foreign research results indicate that customer participation can help to improve customer satisfaction and trust, which is a way of cultivating loyal customers. Thereby, how to manage customer participation effectively has become an important issueas of marketing management for a service enterprise. As the service is very easy to imitate, service companies need to establish a long-term relationship with customers, so that studying the relationship quality becomes necessary. Then, there will be what kind of relationship among customer participation, relationship quality and loyalty? This article attempts to explore the relationship by studying the hairdressing industry.Based on literature and previous study, customer participation is divided into four dimensions: information exchange, cooperation behavior, personal interaction and advice provide, and relationship quality is divided into two dimensions: satisfaction and trust in this article. Then, this study provides an integration model for the relationship among customer participation, relationship quality and loyalty in the service industry. In addition, we have made an empirical examination of the hairdressing industry on this model. The results show that customer participation significantly influences relationship quality and satisfaction significantly influences trust. Moreover, relationship quality significantly influences customer loyalty and the effects of customer participation on customer loyalty are completely mediated through relationship quality. In the end of this paper, we offered some management proposals.