Customer loyalty to service providers: examining the role of service quality, customer satisfaction and trust

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of customer loyalty has become increasingly popular. Both academics and practitioners regard customer loyalty as being fundamental to a company's success. Developing customer loyalty is also a strategy that is well suited to the service industry precisely because services offer more opportunities for such development to take place. Yet despite the obvious importance of customer loyalty to all businesses, and in particular to services, there is still much to be learnt. The purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of service quality, satisfaction and trust on customer loyalty to the service provider by means of structural equation modelling. The results of the empirical research on travel agencies reveal how loyalty depends on the customer's degree of satisfaction and trust. In turn, satisfaction is influenced by service quality. Most previous studies have focused on quality and satisfaction but in this study, we extend the list of factors which predict loyalty by emphasising the importance of trust. The results also confirm that the SERVQUAL scale is applicable to the travel agency sector, and underline the existence of the five dimensions proposed by the original authors. This contributes to the existing debate on the dimensionality of service quality.

Keywords:

• service quality
• customer satisfaction
• trust
• customer loyalty
• services
• SERVQUAL
• structural equation model