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Sigmund Freud (n.d.), the founder of psychoanalysis, stated happiness comes from the satisfaction of needs. Its presence is vital for a human life well lived, to sustain and to thrive. The terms satisfaction and retention have unconscious connotations to the realm of trade and commerce. Lee et al. (2016) found these often go together since happy customers tend to stick around. They have defined the notion as a metric for how well a company, product, or service fulfils the needs and expectations of a consumer measuring the degree of how delighted customers feel when they do business with the company. Several factors influence customer satisfaction including perceived quality, value, convenience, communication, and handling complaints (Tsai, 2016).
Retention is how long customers stay as customers that denote the capability of a company to turn customers into repeat buyers and prevent them from going to a competitor (Zhou et al. 2017). Even with a superior product or service, a company cannot beat its competitors without investing in customer satisfaction and retention (Chin et al. 2016). Service quality is a measure of how an organization delivers its services compared to the expectations of its customers (Kim-Soon et al. 2014). Customers purchase services as a response to specific needs and they either consciously or unconsciously have certain standards and expectations for how a company's delivery of services fulfils those needs (Zeithaml, 2000). He further said a company with high service quality offers services that match or exceed its customers' expectations. Thus, all three variables in this study have commercial connotations but they have been adopted here in a different context.
An educational institution is often considered a business organization where students are the main customers (Leko & Carapic, 2008). Naturally, effective schooling depends on the satisfaction of students (Khan & Iqbal, 2016). People tend to care about learners’ satisfaction because of its potential impact on student motivation, retention, and performance (Hung, 2021). But what measures should be taken to make students more satisfied with their e-learning experiences? How do enhance their retention? What changes in service level should be adopted to serve the e-learning environment better? How does e-service quality affect students’ satisfaction and retention?
The focus of this study is centered on e-learning and students' satisfaction with it in the Indian context, a country desperately struggling toward providing its students quality learning experience that necessitates an unprecedented thrust over e-learning using cutting edged technologies. E-Learning has been expanding rapidly across the globe at all levels of education from schools to universities, especially in the post-COVID-19 world. All previous hesitations or taboos are subsided, and e-learning has placed itself in a permanent position side by side the traditional face-to-face learning (Kundu & Bej, 2021a). Following this changed global order, academic institutions are shifting their focus from traditional service quality to e-service quality (Leonnard, 2018). Here, learners’ satisfaction in the e-learning environment is of compelling interest to educational institutions as learners’ satisfaction is thought to have a high correlation with their performance in a specific class (Osman & Saputra, 2019).
The success of e-learning programs generally depends on learners’ satisfaction (Hung, 2021). Kundu and Bej (2021b) said suggestions for improving digital education revolve around three main areas- attitude, skill, and device. A harmonious synthesis of these three creates a better e-learning environment. But Indian students often face issues such as lack of devices, no internet access, low digital competency, mental support, and lack of self-discipline (Kundu et al. 2020). Therefore, constructive planning needs empirical evidence and holistic appraisal of these factors that affect learners’ satisfaction with e-learning and its impact on their retention.