Earning Customer Loyalty: The Role of Satisfaction, Trust, Delight, Commitment and Involvement

Abstract

Relationship marketing theory emphasizes the importance of developing and maintaining customer-provider relationships. Strong customer relationships evolve over time and through repeated encounters. Through this process both parties learn from and adjust to each other, commitment and trust develop, and satisfactory experiences serve to reinforce customer loyalty. It is critical therefore that service providers understand how these relationships develop. The purpose of this study is to develop and test a relational model of customer loyalty in the context of a high involvement, high contact service. Specifically, we develop hypotheses relative to the impact of satisfaction, trust, delight arousal, delight pleasure, calculative commitment, affective commitment and involvement on loyalty. As an aside, we additionally consider the moderating role of consumption experience in the development of loyalty.