The process of customer loyalty is explained using three antecedents in a sequential order as follows: it starts with customer satisfaction, which influences trust. Trust is essentially linked to commitment as per previous literature, and commitment is the immediate antecedent of customer loyalty: Satisfaction ? trust ? commitment ? customer loyalty.
Published in Chapter:
Customer Store Loyalty: Process, Explanation Chain, and Moderating Factors
Arturo Z. Vásquez-Párraga (The University of Texas – Pan American, USA), Miguel Ángel Sahagún (The University of Texas – Pan American, USA), and Pablo José Escobedo (The University of Texas – Pan American, USA)
Copyright: © 2014
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-6074-8.ch005
Abstract
This chapter examines the process of how store customers become loyal to their stores. The authors pursue a theoretical and empirical research approach designed to identify and test a parsimonious model. The result is an explanation chain that incorporates relational variables, trust and commitment, satisfaction, and the moderating factors of the relational variables. The findings reveal that customer commitment is the major contributing explanation for true customer loyalty, significantly more than the contributed explanation of customer satisfaction. The cognitive moderating factors (store familiarity, store choice, customer perceived risk, and communication) and the affective moderating factors (customer opportunistic tendencies, consumer involvement, shared personal values, and shared management values) are significantly related to the core variables and thus contribute some explanation, yet their contribution is very small compared to the contribution of the core variables, thereby suggesting the significance of the core variables in the explanation of customer store loyalty.