The Empirical Research On The Relation Between Customer Loyalty And Its Influencing Factors Based On Mobile Communication Industry

With the competition picking up and the customer contest cost rising in the consumer market, the developing and protecting loyal customer colony has become the enterprise's important strategy to win the market. Customer Loyalty has been the new focus of the customer management academia and practitioner. Many scholars and managers have realized that loyal customers are the most important resource for profit of enterprise and also the key to win in market competition. Although the research on customer loyalty has been a very popular project in marketing and in practice the influencing factors of customer loyalty in service market has not been interpreted properly. Perceived service quality, customer satisfaction and switching cost, which are as the important influencing factors for customer loyalty have received more attention by the scholars.Although many scholars have made a lot of experiential research on the relation between customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, service quality and switching cost most of the researches have emphasized on the influence of only one or two factors on customer loyalty. Furthermore, they seldom put the relations in any specific industry. Thereby, the relation between customer loyalty and the three factors will be discussed together in this paper under the circumstance of mobile communication market and also the relations among the factors.Moreover, the reason that the author chooses the mobile communication market as the research circumstance is that customer loyalty has become the most important topic for this industry. The competition of mobile communication area is becoming more and more fierce and the managers try to increase the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and maintain the relations between exist customers by the means of value-added service. Lee, Lee & Feick (2001) mentioned that customer loyalty is the key part for mobile communication industry. The operator loses over 30% of the exist customers and pays more for gaining new customers. The documents show that the industry will gain more profit of 15% by slowing down the churn rate.So the purpose of the paper is to consider mobile communication industry as a research object and to find out the relations between customer loyalty and the three influencing factors (Service quality, customer satisfaction and switching cost). Furthermore, some useful suggestions are put forward for helping the Mobile network operator to improve customer loyalty and customer retention strategy.There are five characters in this article. The first character one is a preface. The first chapter is introduction, explicating the motive, purpose and structure of this paper. The second chapter reviews and discusses relevant study. The third chapter is about research methods. This part explains the framework of this paper, selection of study object and sample method, design of questionnaires, modification and reliability analysis and retrieval of data and at last it briefly introduces processing method of retrieved data information. The fourth chapter studies on data from questionnaires. In this part, it first introduces descriptive statistics of research samples, and describes features of research samples according to every variable datum of population statistic. Secondly, by the means of factor analysis, analysis of correlation and regression analysis the relations between customer loyalty and the three influencing factors are detailed explained. The fifth chapter is about conclusion and suggestions. Based on the above parts the author gets the following conclusions:Firstly, in the Mobile Communication Market, customer loyalty is an action outcome of three influencing factors which include service quality, customer satisfaction and switching cost. All the three factors have significant positive relation with customer loyalty. Furthermore, the most influencing factor is service quality, which is far more influence than the others. The next is switching cost and customer satisfaction.Secondly, Service quality has the significant positive relation with customer satisfaction,but not with switching cost.Thirdly, according to the conclusion some useful suggestions are put forward for helping the Mobile operator to improve customer loyalty and customer retention strategy.Finally, the author proposes several suggestions for future study based on limitations of study of this paper.