Theories Of Customer Satisfaction And Loyalty

The Satisfaction-Loyalty Relationship

According to Henning-Thurau and Klee (1997), studies dealing with the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty can be classified into three groups. The first comes from service management literature and studies the relationship at an aggregated, company-wide level. These studies consider satisfaction to be an antecedent of customer loyalty, which in turn influences firms’ profitability.

The second focuses on the individual level and has mainly studied customer retention by customer repurchase intentions. This constitutes an important shortcoming because of the gap between individual intentions and behaviours. This second group perceives loyalty to be influenced by satisfaction, even if the structure of the relationship does not appear to be symmetric and linear.

The third group, which is the smallest, has focused on the satisfaction-loyalty link on an individual level with real purchasing data. Henning-Thurau and Klee (1997) found that studies of this group have tended to reveal a weak or insignificant relationship between satisfaction and repurchase behaviour. These views appear complementary, and, according to Henning-Thurau and Klee (1997), it is time for a fourth group of researchers to integrate this dual conceptualisation.

Attitudinal and Behavioural Loyalty

The first marketing studies perceived customer loyalty in a behavioural way, measuring the concept as behaviour involving the repeat purchase of a particular product or service, evaluated either by the sequence in which it is purchased, as a proportion of purchases, as an act of recommendation, as the scale of the relationship, its scope, or both, or as several of these criteria combined. Since Day (1969) criticised this one-dimensional view as behaviourally-centred and therefore unable to distinguish true loyalty from spurious loyalty, many researchers have recognised the need to add an attitudinal component to the behavioural one.

Indeed, as Bandyopadhyay and Martell (2007) found, the existence of such situational factors as stock being out or unavailable, such individual or intrinsic factors as resistance to change, or such social and cultural factors as social bonding reinforces the need to distinguish customer loyalty from repeat purchase behaviour. These factors also point to a need to add an attitudinal dimension for customer loyalty. This seems to be particularly contextual and therefore relevant in the services area.

Transaction-Specific Satisfaction and Overall Satisfaction

Johnson (2001) found that two conceptualisations of customer satisfaction had emerged over the previous decade. Before the late 1990s, measurement of satisfaction essentially focused on particular product or service transactions, defined as post-choice evaluative judgments concerning specific purchase decisions. More recently, another conception emerged that is concerned with all of a consumer’s previous experiences with a firm, product, or service cumulatively. This perspective considers transaction-specific satisfaction mainly by focusing on consumers’ emotional reactions to specific service attributes or service encounters and suggests that firms link the performance of precise service elements or variations of them to specific psychological responses.

However, overall satisfaction seems to be a better predictor of customer intentions and behaviours. Thus, according to Johnson (2001), these perspectives seem to be more complementary than competitive, and should therefore be investigated simultaneously, as they do not respond to the same managerial objective-based behaviour.