Abstract: |
Marketing mix factors such as price product value, facilitating conditions, and social influence; and factors
such as customer satisfaction, customer experience, habit, hedonic motivation, performance expectancy, effort
expectancy are the major antecedents of customer loyalty. As, loyal customers may buy more services and
have a positive word-of-mouth effect. Moreover, it is evident from previous literature that the cost of selling
service to new customers is much higher than the cost of retaining existing customers. Furthermore, it is
evident fact from telecommunication industry ombudsman Australia reports that companies are still losing
customers at a formidable rate. In this context, the main aim of this paper is to examine the relationships
between these factors and customer loyalty, and the relationships among these factors in the Australian mobile
service scenario. Data for this study was obtained from 1,985 mobile phone users in Australia via online
questionnaire using a marketing company Research Now. The data was analysed by structural equation
modelling (SEM) to test all the relationships between variables in the model. The findings of this research
focus on the measurement model fit part only. The analysis results showed that perceived customer experience
is a necessary but not sufficient condition for customer loyalty. In order to generalize the findings from this
research, this research model should be used in different service industries with different geographic samples.
The contribution of this research is to model all the relationships between customer loyalty and its antecedents,
and to test these relationships simultaneously. In this paper, the effects of all the factors on customer loyalty
are tested simultaneously via structural equation modelling (SEM) and this paper only focuses on model fit. |