为什么客户会转变购买满意度与忠诚度的动态.docx

1、为什么客户会转变购买满意度与忠诚度的动态中文3832字标题：Why do customers switch? The dynamics of satisfaction versus loyalty原文：Why do customers switch? The dynamics of satisfaction versus loyaltyIntroductionCustomer loyalty is increasingly being recognized by American businesses as a path to long-term business profitability.

2、 Consider two firms, say two hospitals, “A” and “B”, with identical facilities and capacity. Both have the same patient load, and consequently the same degree of facility utilization. However, hospital “A” has a loyal following of patients. In contrast, hospital “B” fills its facilities by acquiring

3、 new patients every year because the old patients never return. Which one has greater profitability? Or, in the case of non-profit hospitals, which one is being run more cost-efficiently? The answer is very clear: without question, it is hospital “A” the one with a loyal patient following. This is b

4、ecause finding new customers and doingbusiness with them takes time, effort, and money. Hospital “B” for example, has to invest heavily in advertising to consumers and in personal selling to physicians, so as to attract new patients. Then, it has to spend the effort and precious employee time in set

5、ting up new patient records, for explaining the hospital procedures, and for understanding each patients individual needs,and guiding them through the treatment procedures. The same is true for other service businesses. Insurance agents know, for example, how cumbersome it is to obtain new customers

6、 and to set up their policies. Car mechanics who have handled a particular car in the past become more efficient in diagnosing new problems. Stockbrokers understand their established clients financial goals better. And repeat guests in a hotel are familiar with the hotel facilities and will not call

7、 uponemployee time to seek information.Although companies are realizing the value of keeping customers loyal, no one knows for sure how to do it. Companies measure customer satisfaction, and hope that if the satisfaction scores are good, the customers will stay with the firm. But even satisfied cust

8、omers leave for the lure of a competitors offer. Companies such as airlines and hotels offer frequent guest rewards, yet consumers will still shop around and switch companies from transaction to transaction. According to some observers, customer defection runs as high as 50 percent in many industrie

9、s (Cannie, 1992). We explore the problem of customer defection in service industries. Service industries present a more difficult setting for understanding customer disloyalty as opposed to manufactured goods industries. This is because, for service firms, the basis of consumer choice and continued

10、patronage are less obvious. Services are intangible, and they cannot be completely standardized. At the minimum, they vary according to the mood of the service provider and service customer at the moment of service delivery. Thus, in service businesses, what is given and received is relatively intan

11、gible. Consequently, customer evaluative criteria are less well articulated, and the appraisal of the value received is much more subjective (Berry, 1980; Keaveney, 1995; Lovelock, 1991; Zeithaml et al., 1993). It would be of interest, therefore, to understand customer disloyalty for service busines

12、ses.The second conception and measure of service quality is SERVQUAL. Proposed by researchers Parasuraman et al. (1988), SERVQUAL measures service quality as five dimensions: reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and tangibles. These dimensions are defined as follows: (1) Reliability: Abi

13、lity to perform the promised service dependably and accurately; (2) Responsiveness: Willingness to help customers and provide prompt service; (3) Assurance: Knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence; (4) Empathy: Caring, individualized attention the firm p

14、rovides its customers; (5) Tangibles: Physical facilities, equipment, and appearance of personnel. In most research studies done by SERVQUALs authors, Reliability has been found to be the most influential determinant of overall service quality or of customer satisfaction with the service. But an imp

15、ortant question remains unanswered. This question is: Are the dimensions of SERVQUAL that influence satisfaction also the ones that influence loyalty? We examine this question here.We collected consumer responses on their experience with either of these two services. Our respondents answered a quest

16、ionnaire either for a health clinic or a car repair service facility. Respondents were recruited from PTA organizations, mailbox drops, and mall intercepts in two US cities. One hundred and ten customers answered the survey for a car repair service, and 123 for a health care facility they utilized w

17、ithin the past one year. Operationalization of measures The questionnaire contained the measures of overall satisfaction, intention to switch, technical quality, functional quality, and the SERVQUAL scale. Satisfaction was measured by this item:Overall, with this facility, I am: (1) Extremely dissat

18、isfied. (2) Somewhat dissatisfied. (3) Feel neutral. (4) Somewhat satisfied. (5) Extremely satisfied.In the marketing literature, consumer loyalty has generally been measured as preponderance or bias of past behavioral frequency in favor of a specific brand (e.g. Dick and Basu, 1994). However, such

19、a measure is more suited to consumer goods. For services (particularly for high involvement services that are examined in this research), the measure likely to be most useful to managers is the one that questions respondents on their predisposition to switching suppliers or service providers. We use

20、d this measure to assess the loyalty the respondents felt toward their present health care and car repair service providers. A further point of clarification is that we used only three response categories because of the small sample size; a more graduated scale would have yielded a rather small cell

21、 size of switchers. Moreover, wewould have had to subsequently use an arbitrary dividing line to regroup respondents into loyal and not-loyal customers. The three-point scale, with fewer in-between categories, reduces the need for such arbitrary regrouping by researchers. Nevertheless, our measure o

22、f customer loyalty must be viewed as imperfect. In the discussion section, we suggest improvement in the measure for future research.The dynamics of satisfaction versus loyalty。The foregoing statement about what drives loyalty should be understood with the proviso that loyalty is not entirely divorc

23、ed from satisfaction. The disloyalty/loyalty groups contrasted are from a subpopulation that is already satisfied. Dissatisfied customers are almost always prone to switch (as our data show). That is hardly news. What is news is that even some satisfied customers would switch. In separating disloyal

24、 versus loyal customers, therefore, managers have to ask what drives loyalty beyondsatisfaction. Even more importantly, the drivers of “loyalty beyond satisfaction” are different from what drives dissatisfaction versus satisfaction. In our data, the potency of technical quality (“the quality of the

25、work performed”) and functional quality (“the quality of the service”) in delivering satisfaction and loyalty differed. And it varied between a low contact and a high contact service. For a low contact service (e.g. car repair), technical quality was needed to first obtain satisfaction, and then fun

26、ctional quality was needed to drive loyalty beyond satisfaction. The converse was the case for a high contact (e.g. health care) service. This pattern of findings should guide managers in designing satisfaction and loyalty measurement research in their particular firms. The analysis we employed can

27、also serve as a prototype. Managers can analyze the satisfaction and loyalty data to identify whether the technical or the functional quality improvement is the critical need for their firms at a particular juncture in their service operations. This analysis should help guide a service firms investm

28、ent in appropriate quality initiatives.Satisfied customers are the start of your loyalty campaign not the end Heres a dilemma for managers. Even when your customers say theyre satisfied they still switch to other suppliers. What do these consumers want? Blood? We go to great lengths making sure we h

29、ave satisfied customers and they reward our efforts by switching to our competitor! The truth is what weve always suspected. Satisfied customers arent necessarily loyal customers. Indeed loyalty requires a commitment from the customer that mere satisfaction cannot bring. Mittel and Lassar consider t

30、his dilemma by looking at whether the same factors influence loyalty as influence satisfaction. They confirm that customers “ who report a high satisfaction rating still possess a predisposition to switch service suppliers.” And we also see that (not surprisingly) dissatisfied customers will definit

31、ely switch so you cant ignore satisfaction. But Mittel and Lassars most important finding is that the “type” of quality affecting satisfaction differs from that affecting loyalty. If satisfaction follows from functional quality (empathy, responsiveness, assurance) then loyalty comes from technical q

32、uality (reliability). Similarly satisfaction derived from technical quality means loyalty results from functional quality. The implications of these findings are enormous. First it tells us that customer satisfaction measures are inadequate on their own and need supplementing by a measure of loyalty

33、 (in this study the propensity to switch supplier). And secondly it means that we cannot focus on those elements of quality creating satisfaction because they dont encourage loyalty. The findings provide clarity and answer the switching dilemma but they make service managers job harder still. In the spirit of this discovery I intend to set out