Explaining Customer Loyalty to Retail Stores: A Moderated Explanation Chain of the Process

This chapter reassesses the process of how store customers become loyal to their stores; what are the core subprocesses generating customer store loyalty, and what contributing moderators enrich the final outcome. A new empirical research is designed to identify and test a parsimonious model of core relationships and moderators. The result is an explanation chain that incorporates relational variables, trust, and commitment to the traditional transactional one, customer satisfaction, and the moderating factors of the relational variables. The findings reveal that 1) customer commitment is the major contributor of explanation to true customer loyalty, significantly more than the contributed explanation of customer satisfaction, and 2) four cognitive attitudes and four affective attitudes significantly moderate the relational effects of trust and commitment on customer store loyalty and, thus, contribute, though in small amounts, to a stronger explanation