An Empirical Research On The Influencing Factors Of Customer Loyalty In Service Enterprises

Along with booming development of the service industry, as well as fierce competition, service enterprises realize that it is very important to maintain customer loyalty for their survival, development and benefit, and carrying out relationship marketing and maintaining customer loyalty become an emphasis of marketing strategies. Meanwhile, the marketing academia also gradually comes to realize that customer satisfaction cannot fully explain the formation of customer loyalty, and there are more complicated factors beyond customer loyalty. So the research on the factors that affect customer loyalty and the mechanism becomes the focus of the marketing academia.The former research shows that service quality, customer value, customer satisfaction and switching costs are important influencing factors of customer loyalty, but presently, in academia, there are still a lot of differences and ambiguities about their correlation and mechanism, and it's short of comprehensive empirical research on this question. So, on the basis of previous research results, this paper builds a model to analyze the influencing factors and mechanism of customer loyalty of service enterprises, in which four important factors: service quality, customer value, customer satisfaction and switching costs, are included and customer loyalty is divided into two dimensions: attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty, and then takes retail business of commercial banks as an example for empirical study. In the empirical study, firstly a questionnaire survey is conducted among commercial retail banking customers in Wuhan, and then it uses Structural Equation Modeling and other statistical techniques as tools to analyze the data, evaluating the model and testing hypotheses. Through literature and empirical studies, the paper finally comes to the following conclusions:Service quality directly and positively influences customer value, customer satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty, and also indirectly and positively influences customer satisfaction and attitudinal loyalty, only indirectly positively influences behavioral loyalty; Customer value directly and positively influences customer satisfaction, directly and indirectly positively influences attitudinal and behavioral loyalty; Customer satisfaction directly and positively influences attitudinal and behavioral loyalty, also indirectly and positively influences behavioral loyalty; Switching costs and attitudinal loyalty directly and positively influence behavioral loyalty; The formation mechanism of attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty is different: the most important factor influencing attitudinal loyalty is service quality, followed by customer satisfaction; The most important factor affecting behavioral loyalty is customer value, followed by switching costs.In the end, based on the conclusions of the study, this paper raises a number of proposals to improve customer loyalty of commercial banks, and then sums up some shortcomings and deficiencies of this study and gives some advices of further research.