【正文】
A anizations, 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 within 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 dissatisfied. (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 (. Dick and Basu, 1994). However, such 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 used 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。 The foregoing statement about what drives loyalty should be understood with the proviso that loyalty is not entirely divorced 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 versus loyal customers, therefore, managers have to ask what drives loyalty beyond satisfaction. Even more importantly, the drivers of “l(fā)oyalty beyond satisfaction” are different from what drives dissatisfaction versus satisfaction. In our data, the potency of technical quality (“the quality of the 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 (. car repair), technical quality was needed to first obtain satisfaction, and then functional quality was needed to drive loyalty beyond satisfaction. The converse was the case for a high contact (. 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 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 firm’s investment in appropriate quality initiatives. Satisfied customers are the start of your loyalty campaign not the end Here’s a dilemma for managers. Even when your customers say they’re satisfied they still switch to other suppliers. What do these consumers want? Blood? We go to great lengths making sure we have satisfied customers and they reward our efforts by switching to our petitor! The truth is what we’ve always suspected. Satisfied customers aren’t necessarily loyal customers. Indeed loyalty requires a mitment from the customer that mere satisfaction cannot bring. Mittel and Lassar consider this dilemma by looking at whether the same factors influence loyalty as influence satisf