The VIP Customer Loyalty Of Department Stores Based On Service Profit Chain

With the growing of the business diversification and the fiercely increasing of the commercial competition, nowadays, the leading status of the retailing is being challenged. To adapt to this situation, some changes have being taken by the department stores, even including the strategy direction. Several department stores have being focusing their eyes on the most valuable person, viz. the VIP customers, as their ultimate profit target. The VIP customers, which are the core customers with higher loyalty than the others, will bring long term profits to department stores. However, the VIP system in some department stores of Hangzhou is not operated very well. The value of the VIP costumers have not been fully explored and presented because the VIP system contributes only a little, or even none to the profile composing of these enterprises.In order to find out the existing problems and to cover the shortage of the VIP system, we have made assumption based on the Service-Profit chain, that is the service quality delivered by employees affects the loyalty of VIP customers, and further affects the profits of the emporium. Here, the personnel's loyalty, the service quality, the VIP customers' loyalty and the department profit make up the profit chain cycle of the department store. In addition, we have considered that there are some differences in the emporium services evaluation between the emporium governors and the VIP customers. Therefore, we put forward a conceptual model, supposed the relationship among personnel's loyalty, service quality and the VIP customers' loyalty , and questionnaire was hereby designed. The acquired data were analyzed by SPSS13.0 and Structural Equation Modeling. Some conclusions can be made from the results, as follows: There is a significant correlation between the personnel's loyalty and the service quality provided for VIP customers, while the service quality has a significant correlation with the VIP's cognition, emotion, loyal intention. The VIP's cognition, emotion loyalty affect their behavior loyalty; Personnel's loyalty significantly influences the VIP's cognition, emotion and intention through the service quality. There are differences between the service quality evaluations from the department stores managers and the VIP customers. In other words, evaluations from the former are higher than the ones from the latter.According to these results, we put forward some suggestions for department stores :1. Heightening the personnel's loyalty. The department stores can raise employee's satisfaction and loyalty by constructing common dream, actualizing reasonable recruitment system, enriching the position and participating in occupation career planning. 2. Improving the emporium service quality. By improving the emporium service quality, the VIP customers' attitude loyalty will correspondingly increasing, so as the VIP customers' behavior loyalty.3. Implementing the database marketing and improving the VIP customer's loyalty. The department stores should treat the VIP customers as "God" actually by using VIP card system. In order to cultivate more VIP customers' loyalty, The department stores should not only implement the database marketing, but also take actions to perfect themselves. Just as adding investments, improving the service levels, upgrading the emporium credit standing and so on.