Ahrholdt, Dennis C., Gudergan, Siegfried P., and Ringle, Christian M. (2016) What Drives Customer Loyalty? Nonlinear Effects of Customer Delight and Satisfaction on Loyalty and the Moderating Role of Service Experience. In: Looking Forward, Looking Back: Drawing on the Past to Shape the Future of Marketing: Proceedings of the 2013 World Marketing Congress. pp. 742-750. From: 2013 World Marketing Congress, 17-20 July 2013, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.

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Abstract

We substantiate—theoretically and empirically—the important parallel roles of delight and satisfaction in influencing loyalty in service settings. Our results of a PLS-SEM study support a negative quadratic (i.e., concave) relationship of satisfaction with loyalty and a negative cubic relationship of delight. When allocating (incremental) resources to create customer loyalty, managers should recognize that delight reaches its full impact only after an initial threshold. Similar to satisfaction, this effect reaches a saturation point after an upper threshold at very high levels of delight. Moreover, our results suggest that both delight and satisfaction effects weaken when experience increases.

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