Customer Loyalty and Its Antecedents

Abstract

In the contemporary marketing context, marketers have a substantial interest in studying the nature of customer loyalty and understanding the factors affected customer loyalty in formulating strategies to enhance the level of customer loyalty. Moreover, building and measuring customer loyalty and evaluating the nature and impact of antecedents of customer loyalty have drawn a higher attention in the field of marketing. The study was conducted to evaluate the impact of the major antecedents of customer loyalty in the mobile phone telecommunications services industry in Sri Lanka since the industry plays a pivotal role in the Sri Lankan business context. The quantitative research approach was adopted and a customer survey was employed as the main research method to collect data. The population consists of mobile phones subscribers and the sample comprises 424 mobile phones subscribers. Convenience sampling technique was employed and the data were collected using a structured questionnaire. Customer satisfaction, perceived value, trust, corporate image, service quality, loyalty programmes and switching costs were identified as the key antecedents of customer loyalty. Factor analysis was employed to purify the scale items and identify the underlying antecedents of customer loyalty. The sampling adequacy was measured using KMO value and the reliability was measured using Cronbach Alpha where all variables reported the values above the threshold level. The results of the regression analysis indicate that perceived value, customer satisfaction, service quality, loyalty programmes and switching costs have significant positive impact on customer loyalty while corporate image and trust are non-significant. Also, perceived value has the highest impact on customer loyalty among the loyalty antecedents.