The impact of customer experience and customer emotion towards customer loyalty: the mediating role of customer satisfaction in telecommunication sector / Noorain Imbug

Business environment nowadays is striving to establish a long-term relationship with their customers. Providing better services to the customers is deemed strengthening and sustaining the existing customer loyalty programme. However, better service alone is insufficient to be acknowledged as a viable differentiation for the industry players to remain competitive. This study primary objective is to examine the relationship between customer experiences mediated by customer satisfaction towards the formation of customer loyalty. Concurrently, this study also examines the influence of customer experience towards customer satisfaction and the influence of customer experience towards customer emotion and also the effects of customer emotion againts customer satisfaction towards cementing customer loyalty. A self-administrated questionnaire was distributed to 247 of mobile telecommunication subscribers as a sample for this study. In the second-order model derived from the results, customer experience is depicted through six dimensions: core service, charging, price perception, employee service, brand image, and trust, which are significantly impacting customer loyalty. Partial Least Square (PLS) is used to analyse the data for the results. The findings of this study revealed that all factors contributed towards customer experience (core service, charging, price perception, employee service, brand image, and trust) have significant effects on customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. Collectively, customer experience and customer emotion are significantly found to have positive effects on customer satisfaction. Thus, factors that moulded better customer experience also instigated customer loyalty. Specifically, current research findings offered an empirical evidence of the effects of customer experience on customer loyalty within the telecommunication sector. The results provide significant connections on relationship durability between customers and the service providers; they offered the best practice guideline in building customer loyalty through customer experience and enhanced satisfaction. Generally, designing customer experience would allow the telecommunication industry to accomplish more. The current study also anticipates to augmenting the marketing managers’ knowledge and understanding the importance of customer experience towards both customer loyalty and customer satisfaction, and subsequently able to wisely manage the identified determinants that contributes to a greater customer experience.