Mediating effects of customer satisfaction and customer delight on perceived value and customer loyality in Iran's hotel industry

Creating and maintaining customer loyalty is an important strategy to maintain a competitive advantage. Customers decide to purchase services based on perceived value or the degree of satisfaction of their needs and expectations about service quality and perceived price as value components. The main objective of this research is to identify and analyze factors that affect customer loyalty in hotel industry. This research is conducted to offer an integrated model, a continuum from value components to customer loyalty. A conceptual model was developed to examine the effect of service quality and perceived price on customer perceived value directly and on customer satisfaction, customer delight and customer loyalty indirectly. Quantitative method was applied. This study focuses on hotel sector in Esfahan city in Iran. 414 guests from nine hotels (3 and 4-star) participated in the survey. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was utilized to examine the research hypotheses by the aid of SmartPLS application. The results indicated that customer perceived value, customer satisfaction and customer delight are significant antecedents of customer loyalty. Furthermore, service quality and perceived price have significant impact on customer perceived value. In addition, customer delight has a key role as a mediator between customer perceived value and customer satisfaction on customer loyalty. The results provide practitioners with a more integrated model in understanding customer loyalty, especially in hotel sector. The results offer factors which help to create a seamless relationship with customers in order to gain customer loyalty, specifically for the hotel industry

DOES SUPPLIER’S WILLINGNESS TO CUSTOMIZE INFLUENCE THE BUYER’S RETENTION?

Since the last decade, customer retention has become the central topic in the management and marketing decisions in many companies.  A 5% increase in customer retention can lead to 25-95 % increase in profits. A retained customer is the loyal one to the companies due to the attachment and commitment. This loyal customer will, recommend other customers to purchase and repurchase the companies’ products and services. How we can enhance customer retention? This is one of the main challenges for most of professionals, which requires a lot of investigations. Therefore, the antecedents of customer retention required enough attention. This study explores literatures on antecedents of customer retention in Business-to-Business relationship. Based on the thorough literatures done, a theoretical framework is proposed and some possible recommendations are put forward for future researches. Keywords: Customer retention; Supplier’s willingness to customize; Supplier-buye

Efficiency or inefficiency of customer satisfaction as one of the main antecedents of customer loyalty in tourism and hospitality industry

The purpose of this paper is to have an overview on customer satisfaction as one of the main antecedents of customer loyalty. This paper attempts to discuss the role of customer satisfaction so as to highlight its efficiency and inefficiency on customer loyalty. In this sense, following problem is addressed by this study. The problem is; satisfied customers may not return to the firm and spread positive word-of-mouth communications to others despite of having customer satisfaction. Efficiency and inefficiency of customer satisfaction discussed to bold inefficiency of customer satisfaction alone in order to gain customer loyalty in long-run. Customer satisfaction is discussed by offering a review on efficiency and inefficiency of customer satisfaction critically. Therefore, pros and cons of previous studies regarding customer satisfaction are discussed so as to come out with a conceptual idea to solve addressed problem. Customer satisfaction is a result of meeting customer's expectations, while informed customers are looking for beyond satisfaction. They look for new experiences from their interaction with sellers. It means what customers are looking for is more than satisfaction for having long-term relationship with firms. Much information exists about customer satisfaction and its advantages, whereas, shortage or inefficiency of customer satisfaction has not been considered enough over last years. This paper is going to take practitioners attention to this point that customer loyalty will not be gained just with satisfying their customer. Practitioners should offer something beyond customer's expectation which is a competitive advantage as well and make the firm distinct from its competitors