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Theories Of Customer Satisfaction And Customer Loyalty: Antecedents And ...



Theories of Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty:
Antecedents and Resultants In Application to Financial Services
Customer loyalty relevance and antecedents
Customer loyalty has lately been in the focus of academia as one of the main controlled factors of success (Porter,1984, Johnson &Scholes, 2002). While the definition of loyalty itself has mainly been limited to existence of intentions of customers such as to stay with the company, to provide word of mouth recommendation, the current theories of relationship marketing acknowledge that it may not necessarily guarantee the actual favourable behaviour. However, chances are that with the current state of market offers and situation customers would more likely stay with the bank (Harrison, 2004, Assael, 1987, Jobber,2002).
However, as for the antecedents of the loyalty there has been a considerable issue over the question of whether the core, contractual service delivery or relational aspects of service would serve as antecedents of the loyalty (Jamal &Naser, 2002,Levesque &McDougal, 1996, Groonroos, 1984, Levesque & McDougal, 1994; Parasuraman et al, 1991). Some authors argue that process outcomes of the service, in the current case delivery of credit resources, would determine whether customer is intended to stay with the bank or withdraw, while a few argued that relational aspects, intangible benefits of the service delivery would be a loyalty antecedent (Parasuraman et al, 1991).
Some authors argue that these two types of antecedents are interrelated, one (process outcome) serving as determinant of global satisfaction, which in fact, will include the relational factors as well and is main determinant of loyalty (Taylor &Baker, 1994, Patterson & Johnson, 1993;Rust &Oliver, 1994). However, the merits of the current paper requires the distinction between relational customer satisfaction and satisfaction with contractual processes, since the objective of the paper is to find out, whether the NBU is going to succeed with its customer oriented strategy in the upcoming economic environment or is it prone to failure as a result of heavy investments in fixed assets and in marketing activities.
Therefore, the paper uses less global definition of satisfaction relational satisfaction as customer satisfaction. Process outcomes of the service are included in service quality.
Loyalty has mainly been defined as a set of intentions to stay with the company [repurchase], provide word of mouth recommendations, to stay with the company even if the product is temporarily unavailable and wait, intention to stay with the bank even if the promotional rates are being offered in competitor banks (Cronin and Taylor, 1992, Assael, 1987, Harrison, 2004).

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