Identification of effective factors on customer loyalty with mobile industry

Article history: Received May 12, 2013 Received in revised format 30 June 2013 Accepted 28 July 2013 Available online July 3


Introduction
Customer satisfaction has been a major concern and can be a bridge for building loyal customers (Fornell, 1992;Churchill Jr & Surprenant, 1982;Fornell et al., 1996;Chan et al., 2003;Kotler, P., & Keller, 2012).Eklöf (2000), for instance, considered European customer satisfaction index pan-European telecommunication sector report based on the pilot studies 1999.Hsu et al. (2006) presented an application of customer satisfaction study to derive customer knowledge.Hackl et al. (2000) studied customer satisfaction in the Austrian food retail market.Hellier et al. (2003) investigated customer repurchase intention by looking into a general structural equation model.Su (2004) concentrated on hotel guest comment cards (GCCs) and customer satisfaction management schemes in Taiwan by implementing content analysis to detect the extent in which each hotel's comment card design corresponded to the identified best practice criteria.Su reported that no single hotel analyzed within the survey sample of the study met all identified best practice criteria for their GCCs.Su recommended that the hotel industry in Taiwan re-examine its approach to evaluat customer satisfaction, with the objective of achieving conformity to all critical best practice criteria identified.Anderson et al. (1994) used a method originally suggested by Carman (1970) to empiricaly investigat customer satisfaction, market share, and profitability in Sweden.Andreassen and Lindestad (1998) performed a survey on customer loyalty and complex services by looking into the impact of corporate image on quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty for customers with varying degrees of service expertise.Aydin and & Özer (2005) investigated national customer satisfaction indices in the Turkish mobile telephone market.Ball et al. (2004) studied the role of communication and trust in explaining customer loyalty.Beerli et al. (2004) reported that satisfaction together with personal switching costs were antecedents leading directly to customer loyalty, with the former exerting the greatest influence; and perceived quality was a consequence of satisfaction in banking industry.Biggs and Swailes (2006) investigated the relationships, commitment and satisfaction in agency workers and permanent workers.They reported that there were significant correlations within the sample between organizational commitment, being valued and job satisfaction further supported by a hierarchical multiple linear regression.Boulding et al. (1993) presented a dynamic process model of service quality: from expectations to behavioral intentions.Bruhn and Grund (2000) developed theory, development and implementation of national customer satisfaction indices in the Swiss Index of Customer Satisfaction (SWICS).Caruana (2002) considered service loyalty by looking into the effects of service quality and the mediating role of customer satisfaction.Cater and Cater (2009) investigated the relationship-value-based antecedents of customer satisfaction and loyalty in manufacturing.Gerpott et al. (2001) studied the relationship among customer retention, loyalty, and satisfaction in the German mobile cellular telecommunications market.Guo et al. (2004) investigated the relationship between customer loyalty and profitability.Karjaluoto et al. (2002) studied different factors underlying attitude formation towards online banking in Finland.Kristensen et al. (2000) measured customer satisfaction as a key dimension of business performance.They stated that customer satisfaction is an increasingly powerful dimension of business performance and explained empirical evidence that customer satisfaction measures had an impact on business.Ndubisi (2006) investigated the effect of gender on customer loyalty by looking into a relationship marketing approach.The author aimed to investigate the role of gender in the association of relationship marketing underpinnings with customer loyalty.The results showed that the four underpinnings of relationship marketing were directly associated with customer loyalty.

The proposed model
The proposed study of this paper measures the effect of quality of services (Zeithaml, 1996) on different issues such as customer satisfaction, customer complaints, etc. and it is performed among a sample of North Tehran branch of Islamic Azad University in city of Tehran, Iran who had some experience on using mobile services in a 8-month period in 2012.The sample size is determined as follows, where N is the population size, represents the yes/no categories, and N=4500, the number of sample size is calculated as n=384.In our study, we have distributed 400 questionnaires and managed to collect 384 filled ones.All questions were designed in Likert scale in four different categories.Table 1 demonstrates some of the results of our findings, As we can observe from the results of Table 1, all components can be verified and we can proceed the survey.In addition, the survey has been verified based on different methods and Table 2 summarizes the results of our survey.The results of Table 2 also verify the questionnaire and we can proceed the survey.The proposed model of this paper considers the following hypotheses,

Personal characteristics of the participants
In our survey, 104(27.1%) of the participants were male and 280(72.9%)participants were female students participated.Fig. 1 demonstrates other relevant information associated with this survey.

Age
Years of educations Average income (Million Rials) Fig. 1.Personal characteristics in terms of percentage Most participants were using two primary mobile service providers of HAMRAH AVAL with 52.6% and IranCell with 36.5%.
Table 3 shows details of our findings on some basic statsitics on the survey.In addition, Table 4 demonstrates the summary of our validation survey on all questionnaires.

Table 4
The summary of validating the questionnaire of our survey The results of Table 4 clearly confirm the overall survey in terms of validation.In addition, there are positive and meaningful correlations among different components of the survey, which validates the overall questionnaire.

The results
In this section, we present the results of our survey on testing various hypotheses of the survey.Fig. 1 demonstrates the results.The first hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of perceived expectation on perceived quality.
The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.931 with t-value=49.710>19.6.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the first hypothesis and conclude that PE positively influences PQ.

The second hypothesis: The effect of PE on PV
The second hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of perceived expectation on perceived value.The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.187 with t-value=4.575>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the second hypothesis and conclude that PE positively influences PV.

The third hypothesis: The effect of PQ on PV
The third hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of perceived quality on perceived value.The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.78 with t-value=19.43>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the third hypothesis and conclude that PQ positively influences PV.

The fourth hypothesis: The effect of PE on CS
The fourth hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of perceived expectation on customer satisfaction.The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.25 with t-value=7.660>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the fourth hypothesis and conclude that PE positively influences CS.

The fifth hypothesis: The effect of PQ on CS
The fifth hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of perceived quality on customer satisfaction.The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.208 with t-value=4.691>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the fifth hypothesis and conclude that PQ positively influences CS.

The sixth hypothesis: The effect of PV on CS
The sixth hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of perceived value on customer satisfaction.The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.537 with t-value=13.494>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the sixth hypothesis and conclude that PV positively influences CS.

The seventh hypothesis: The effect of CS on RL
The seventh hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of customer satisfaction on repurchase likelihood.The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.593 with t-value=18.424>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the seventh hypothesis and conclude that CS positively influences RL.

The eighth hypothesis: The effect of CS on PT
The eighth hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of customer satisfaction on price tolerance.The results of regression analysis yields a positive value of 0.710 with t-value=16.391>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the eighth hypothesis and conclude that CS positively influences PT.

The ninth hypothesis: The effect of CS on CC
The ninth hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of customer satisfaction on customer complaints.The results of regression analysis yields a negative value of -0.911 with t-value=|-43.133|> 1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the ninth hypothesis and conclude that CS negatively influences CC.

The tenth hypothesis: The effect of CC on RL
The tenth hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of customer complaints on repurchase likelihood.The results of regression analysis yields a negative value of -0.393 with t-value = |-12.241|>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the ninth hypothesis and conclude that CS negatively influences RL.

The eleventh hypothesis: The effect of CC on PT
The eleventh hypothesis of this survey examines the effect of customer complaints on price tolerance.The results of regression analysis yields a negative value of -0.244 with t-value = |-5.642|>1.96.Since the result of t-student is statistically significance (α=5%) we can confirm the ninth hypothesis and conclude that CC negatively influences PT.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have examined the relationship between different components of quality using structural equation modeling.The proposed model of this survey has considered the relationship between perceived quality, perceived expectation, perceived value, customer satisfaction, price tolerance, repurchase likelihood and customer complaints.The results of our study have disclosed that perceived expectation positively influences perceived quality and perceived value.Perceived quality, in turns, influences perceived value, positively.In addition, perceived value influences customer satisfaction and customer satisfaction influences repurchase likelihood and price tolerance, positively.Finally, customer satisfaction negatively influences customer complaints, customer complains, in turn; influences repurchase likelihood and customer complaints influences price tolerance, negatively.
of normal distribution and finally  is the error term.Since we have 96

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The summary of the results of our survey 3.1 The first hypothesis: The effect of PE on PQ

Table 1
The summary of content verification

Table 2
The summary of validating the questionnaire of our survey

Table 3
The summary of some basic statsitsics