왜 충성고객이 떠나는가?: 진정한 충성고객과 유사 충성고객의 차이 분석

초록

While service loyalty has been always an important result of customer satisfaction, nowadays, the concept of spurious loyalty attracts many marketers’ attention. Spurious loyalty means the repetition of patronage with a relative low attitude to the service provider or brand. Previous researches mostly focused on true loyalty which customer attitude is led to repeated patronage. However, there is still a lack of research on spurious loyalty that can switch service at any time after purchase. Service with high levels of customization is mostly heterogeneous, and the importance of customer perception on service quality is becoming bigger. Therefore, the spurious loyalty phenomenon should be regarded as a customer decision making formed through other paths rather than interpreted as habitual purchase by inertia. In this study, based on previous researches, we established a research model with service satisfaction, personal identification, service trust, and switching barriers as determinants of service loyalty. We also examined how the causal relationship between these variables differs among truly loyal and spuriously loyal customers. The results of this study are as follows. First, there are spuriously loyal customers who make repeated purchases with a relatively low attitude. Second, the loyalty forming process of spuriously loyal customers is differing from truly loyal customers. Especially, for truly loyal customers, attitudinal loyalty path is significant to behavioral loyalty. On the other hand, for spuriously loyal customers, the path through switching barrier played an important role along with the attitudinal loyalty path. In addition, the effect of personal identification, which has been shown to be an important variable affecting service loyalty in previous studies, did not appear within spuriously loyal customers.

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