Study On The Mechanism Of Loyalty Program Service Quality Influencing To Brand Loyalty In Retail Environment

In recent decades, the development of e-commerce makes the competition in retail industry increasingly fierce, and loyalty programs have become the most common way to maintain customer relationship. Besides, with the advent of the service economy, the pursuit of customers of products and service are no longer stay in the affordable level, but more and more focus on the perception of service quality and relationship quality. Especially in the field of supermarket, the appearance of new supermarkets and influx of foreign supermarkets make the competition increasing fierce, forming coexist condition of domestic and foreign supermarket, which makes it necessary for enterprises to achieve customer relationship maintaining through implementation and improvement of loyalty program. And the corresponding research in service quality, relationship quality and customer loyalty has thus become the focus of public attention.This paper selects loyalty program service quality in supermarket industry as the research object. Based on relevant literature review and analysis and combined with the characteristics of the object and service quality, it builds targeted evaluation dimensions for service quality, relationship quality and customer loyalty, introduces customer relationship proness as the moderator, proposes the corresponding hypothesis and establishes the related structural model. Followed by a questionnaire to obtain data and analysis of reliability, validity, SEM and multivariate variance, the model and hypothesizes have been verified, drawing the appropriate conclusions as well.The result shows that loyalty program service quality in supermarket industry includes four dimensions, which are program policy, reward, personality and communication quality. It also turns out that reward and communication quality have a significant positive impact on relationship quality, customer relationship proness can enhance the relationship between reward and relationship quality,and relationship quality can positively affect both program loyalty and brand loyalty and the latter is stronger. Besides, it proves that program loyalty can bring brand loyalty. Based on the above conclusions, the paper makes some recommendations on management practice for managers in supermarket and other similar retailing industry and describes the limitations of this study and future research directions.