Mechanism Of Customer Retention Based On The Quality Of Service Of Instant Communications Industry

China's internet instant message industry has been in rapid growing for almost 10 years. At the right moment, both the supply and demand market are booming: On one hand, more and more IT enterprises and telecom operators are entering this market, making the competition getting more severely; On the other hand, the increasing customers and their demands bring more huge potential market. However, the low entrance barrier and homogeneity technology makes it difficulty to gain success for the enterprises that depend on technology only. Upon such background, customers are the most valuable resource and customer retention rise to be the most important thing across the enterprise's table, hi order to keep the customer resource, the enterprises should improve service quality, customer value and satisfaction to gain customers' behavior intention of loyalty and thus strengthen the enterprises' competition advantages.Definition and measurement of service quality and e-service quality have been researched and some valuable results are got. But study about the measurement of internet instant message industry's service quality and the effect mechanism of this service quality on customer retention has not been found yet. With the purpose of measuring service quality of internet instant message industry appropriately and exploring the effect mechanism of this service quality on customer retention, a two-stage empirical research are conducted, and three contributions or innovative achievements are concluded as following:(1) Measurement system of internet instant message industry's service quality is constructed based on the existent literature and practical circumstances.The preliminary measurement dimensions are set up with exploratory factor analysis (EFA), while the final measurement dimensions and structure are confirmed with confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The five measurement dimensions are efficiency, commitment fulfillment, privacy and security, empathy, technology and function fulfillment.(2) The effect mechanism of service quality on customer retention in the internet instant message industry is put forward.The structure equation model is constructed and verified in which service quality is defined as independent variable, customer retention as dependent variable, with customer value and customer satisfaction as mediator. The study suggests that in the background of internet instant message, service quality has strong direct positiveeffect on customer retention, and affects customer retention indirectly with customer value and satisfaction. However, the direct effect of customer value on customer retention is proved to be invalid.(3) The effect of customer's group character on function-choice is recognized.Variance analysis is conducted for function-choice on group samples according to gender, age, education level, usage history, usage frequency. It is found that customer's the age and usage history has strong effect on the function-choice.