An Investigation of Mediating and Moderating Variables in Service Quality – Customer Loyalty Relationship

Abstract

With the increasing focus on customer relationships and profound impact that customer’s evaluative judgements exercise on customer loyalty, it is important to uncover the directional as well as moderating influences on customer loyalty formation. A complete understanding of type and strength of the relationship and their influencers would contribute in developing a comprehensive model that may not just clearly define the form and structure of relationship for future researches but also help industries in building loyalty and rationalize marketing expenditure. The present study aims to delineate the concept and significance of customer loyalty and offers a conceptual framework involving service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. A comprehensive survey of literature explored that customer satisfaction provides a directional influence to the relationship of service quality and customer loyalty and a mediation model integrating the relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is proposed for investigation. Furthermore, moderating effects on the service quality and customer loyalty link have been examined and four moderating variables namely, customer knowledge and expertise, price perceptions, service convenience and switching costs have been extracted from the literature. These variables need to be investigated to assess their role and strength in moderating the relationship between the two constructs.

Dimensional Analysis of Service Quality: Small Construction Business and Australian Household

“…The results in (Table 3) show that the B coefficient is 62.8% (statistically significant). This finding is consistent with previous studies (Cronin & Taylor, 1992;Parasuraman et al, 1988;Srivastava & Rai, 2013;Taylor & Baker, 1994;Zulua & Chilesheb, 2010).…”

“…The concept of customer satisfaction has attracted much attention among academics in various contexts like insurance (Srivastava & Rai, 2013), banking (Caruana, 2002), healthcare (Boshoff & Gray, 2004), aged care (Leventhal, 2008), and construction (Forsythe, 2007). There is significant evidence in the literature that supports the relationship between the level of satisfaction reported by the customers of a business and its financial performance (Okoroh, Jones, & Ilozor, 2003).…”

“…Research looking into the relationship among the constructs of service quality, customer satisfaction and behavioural intentions have been conducted by several authors in various settings, such as airlines (An & Noh, 2009), life insurance (Srivastava & Rai, 2013), telecommunication (Srivastava & Sharma, 2013), service factory (Olorunniwo, Hsu, & Udo, 2006), freight services (Molinari, Abratt, & Dion, 2008), information systems (Chumpitaz & Paparoidamis, 2004), travel golfers (Hutchinson, Lai, & Wang, 2009), and technology (Ansari, Farooquie, & Gattoufi, 2016).…”

Exploring service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty in Vietnam’s telecommunications industry

“…Some researchers used Servqual to investigate service quality in the telecommunications industry (Wal et al, 2002;Johnson and Sirikit, 2002). While others developed specific service quality conceptualization and measurement models for this sector (Aydin and Özer, 2005;Santouridis and Trivellas, 2010;Kim et al, 2004;Gerpott et al, 2001;Lee et al, 2001;Lim et al, 2006;Srivastava and Rai, 2013). The models developed suggest several dimensions, whose definitions and meaning overlap to a great extent.…”

The Mediating Effect of Customer Satisfaction on the Relationship Between Perceived Value and Word-of-Mouth in the Airline Industry

“…In this study, it was aimed to examine the mediating effect of customer satisfaction on the relationship between perceived value and word-of-mouth. There are several studies in the literature that examine the mediating effect of customer satisfaction (Pereira et al, 2016;Wahab et al, 2016;Usta and Memiş, 2009;Agus and Abdullah, 2000;Osman and Sentosa, 2013;Chumpitaz and Swaen, 2002;Srivastava and Rai, 2013;Al-Hawari and Ward, 2006). However, the number of studies regarding whether the mediating effect of customer satisfaction on the relationship between perceived value and word-of-mouth is very limited.…”