Building and Maintaining Customer Loyalty - Essay Example

Typically, the current research promotes a belief that “the strong focus on customer satisfaction is based on the implicit assumption that there is a strong positive relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty” (Anderson and Sullivan 1993; Ribbink, Allard, et al. 2004; Leverin and Liljander 2006). In the case of the Internet banking industry, customer loyalty should always result in increased Internet bank value and improved asset efficiency. Thus, the major goal of Internet banking is to result in higher customer satisfaction.

In contemporary literature, satisfaction is a frequent object of discussion e.g. (Oliver 1980; Oliver 1981; Johnson and Fornell 1991; Edvardsson, Johnson, et al. 2000; Gustafsson, Johnson, et al. 2005). Previous research has usually defined the concept of satisfaction as an evaluative judgment, which is post-choice and relates to a specific purchase decision. (Oliver 1999) is the first scholar who defined customer satisfaction as the complex psychological condition when the emotions from making a purchase disconfirmed consumer expectations are to link or join together with prior feelings of customers about the customer experience.

In summary of the previous study, customer satisfaction is usually treated as the consequence of two different conceptualizations: cognitive processes and cumulative. From the perspective of cognitive processes, customer satisfaction is necessarily a judgment, which is post-choice and evaluative (Kotler 1991). Recent studies suggest that affections contribute, explain, affect, and predict customer satisfaction (Homburg and Giering 2001). Some scholars also examined customer satisfaction consumers’ affective response to the event of purchase (Babin and Griffin 1998; Bagozzi, Gopinath, et al. 1999). In cumulative customers, satisfaction and purchase judgments are based on cumulative experiences.

This is a general evaluation that grounds on general experience with the products and services of one particular firm in long-time periods (Oliver 1980).