Study Of Influencing Factors Of Customer Loyalty Of Instant Messaging Products

Based on the adequate analysis of Instant Messaging(IM) industry's development environment, current situation and questions which be faced with now, we find that gaining the customer loyalty(CL) is very important for IM enterprise obtaining competitive advantage. So this paper focuses on analyzing and researching the influence factors of the Instant Messaging customer loyalty (IMCL). Meanwhile, it combines the multiple characters of IM itself and the consumer character in psychology and behavior. Then a new conception of IMCL in intension and extension is defined. As a result, a model named the influence factors of IMCL is founded.After a mass of interviews and questionnaire surveys through the major IM consumer of on campus students, we get 414 valid surveys. Using SPSS13.0 to statistic analysis, the results of analysis proves that the model and its hypothesis are true and reasonable. At the same time, we gain some main conclusions as follow:1. There are four factors which affect IMCL directly, including customer lock-in, customer value, customer satisfaction and no mutual communication. Among them, the last one plays the least role only in customer attitude loyalty.2. Switching cost, network externalities, additional function, branding image, safety & stabilization, require of computer configuration & bandwidth, these are six causal variables that need to be mainly considered in the influence factors of the IMCL. They not only directly restrict customer lock-in, customer value and customer satisfaction, but also influence the IMCL indirectly by the three direct influence factors.3. Among customer lock-in, customer value and customer satisfaction, they are closely related to each other, and customer lock-in takes the largest part in IMCL.4. It's the first time to report that network externalities is one of the import influence factor to IMCL, and it's proved.5. Generally speaking, the influence factors of IMCL have no remarkable difference from"student or not","used payment function or not"and"using single function or not"; while they will cause the remarkable difference in customer loyalty degree, expect"student or not".