Understanding Customer Loyalty and Service Quality

2.3 Customer Loyalty
Sionade Robinson and Lyn Etherington (2006), defined customer loyalty as an emotional and attitude-based preference resulting in the behaviour of spontaneous personal recommendation or purchase. Duffy’s law (2011), stated that what matters is not how satisfied you keep your customers, it’s how many satisfied customers you keep.
Loyalty is a positive propensity for an organisation or brand (Da Silva & Alwi, 2006). In general, loyalty has been considered in various ways, such as positive word of-mouth, repurchase intention and so on. Burton (2002) argued that loyalty is probably better seen as attitude than behaviour.
Sionade Robinson and Lyn Etherington (2006), argued that winning customer loyalty is absolutely the be-all
Customer perceived quality is mainly depended on customers past experience with the service, there are factors that can influence customer perceived quality such as price of the service. Furthermore, according to Parasuraman and Grewal (2000) the quality of service is a fundamental element in the perception of perceived value, as it is the most difficult thing for competitors to imitate and the base on which differentiation and competitive advantage are
& Diggines, C. (2012), durability and functionality of products are becoming increasingly important to customers and they want items to last as long as possible. This has an impact on suppliers who needs to ensure that they meet such requirements. if suppliers meet the quality standard s of customers, they are in a better position to charge prices that reflect the perceived quality.
Telephone surveys, questionnaires, surveys the customer via emails, customer service focus group, physical focus group and conduct online search are few methods that are used to measure the quality of customer services a leading indicator of consumer repurchase intentions and loyalty. It’s a point of differentiation, it increases customer lifetime value, it reduces negative word of mouth, and it’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones.
2.4.1 The five dimension of service quality
Extensive research over the years has resulted in a number of variable being identified that encapsulate the dimensions used by consumers to evaluate service quality. This list was originally quite extensive, but over the years it has been reduced to five main dimensions. These dimensions are important to understand as they form the foundation of the evaluation of service quality .and the correction of any service quality shortfalls described Machado, R. & Diggines, C. (2012). Figure 2: The dimensions of service