The Factors Of Customer Commitment And Its Relationship With Customer Loyalty

The center of marketing is transferring gradually from “product centric” to“customer centric”, which makes company pay utmost attention to customersatisfaction and customer relationship creation. How to enhance customer loyalty isbecoming the research focus for many scholars. On the other side, customer’s servicedemands have become diversified and personalized with the coming of serviceeconomy times. In these circumstances the only solution for the service industry isto practise relationship marketing and put the accent on consumer demand in order toreserve customers and make success. As the representive of service industry, ourbanking is facing tough challenges. For China’s financial regimecontinuous-reformation and financial markets full-opening to the outside world, theincreasing competition is among our banking. As per the first China bankinginvestigation report which published by TNS in2007, the present China bankingcustomer retention index is lower than globle average leavel which ranged to45%.How to retain customer and improve customer loyalty is becoming a problem whichneed to be solved urgently for domestic banks. Under such background, this thesischosen service industry commercial bank as the object, it has important practicalsignificance to research customer loyalty in the view of customer commitment.Through literature review on the theory of customer commitment and customerloyalty, the research model and hypothesis were made by combining with practicalapplication. Then the hypothesis were verified through data collecting byquestionnaire, described analysis, reliability analysis and validity analysis whichconducted by SPSS17.0. The conclusions were reached on this study, which provided constructive suggestions to customer relationship establishing and customer loyaltybuilding.Through research and analysis, the following conclusions are reached:（1）The factors of customer commitment: Through empirical analysis, theinfluence factors has been verified and they all have positive influences: There are thepositive influence of economic value and switching-cost to calculative commitment;The positive influence of customer satisfaction and customer trust to emotionalcommitment;The positive influence of preferential treatment to normativecommitment.（2）The relationship between customer commitment and customer loyaltyExcept the influence of normative to behavior loyalty, all the other assumptions of theinfluence factors to customer loyalty have been verified. It is the positive influence ofcalculative commitment, emotional commitment and normative commitment tocustomer loyalty; The positive influence of calculative commitment and emotionalcommitment to customer behavior loyalty; And the positive influence of customerattitude loyalty to customer behavior loyalty.（3）The partial effect of customer commitment：Research found that calculativecommitment, emotional commitment and normative commitment act as partialintermediary, that’s means economic value and switching-cost could affect customerloyalty through intervening variable on customer loyalty, and they can also act oncustomer loyalty directly.（4）Besides set up independent variable, intervening variable and dependentvariable, this article also set up control variable such as gender, age etc. Throughempirical analysis, the finding is: The control-variant of age, personal monthlyincome have an effect on calculative commitment; The control-variant of age,occupation, personal monthly income have an effect on normative commitment;Personal monthly income have an effect on attitude loyalty.This research conclusion is based on the empirical study for Bank ofCommunications Yiyang branch, which has certain experience to other commercialbanks. It helps commercial banks to understand their customer needs and establish associated marketing strategy in order to retain old clients and develop new clients soas to create greater value.