A Study on the Influences of Service Quality Cognition and Satisfaction on Customer Loyalty

• Main Authors: CHEN,WAN-TE, 陳萬得
• Other Authors: LIN, SHU-MEI
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/j77s64

碩士 === 崑山科技大學 === 國際商務與金融研究所 === 107 === The development of automobile industry is usually closely related to the economic development of a country. When the purchasing power increases with the GDP, the automobile industry will not only grow positively with the economy, but also drive the development of services such as logistics, advertising, finance, insurance and automobile repair and maintenance. In Taiwan, cars have become inextricably linked to the work or daily life of everyone. Whatever it is a car or a truck, safety for driving is the most important consideration to consumers when they consider to buy one. In addition, they also begin to pay attention to the service quality of car maintenance and repair. In the drastically competitive automobile market, all manufacturers are trying to improve their product performance as well as provide excellent after-sales services with customers in order to maintain long-term customer relationships. Based on the above research motivation, this study adopts an Internet survey to examine the causal relationship between service quality and customer loyalty. The online survey conducted from July 19 to July 25, 2018 to collect data about consumer evaluations on the service of car repair and maintenance. Finally, a total of 573 valid questionnaires were collected. According to the research results, the cognition of and satisfaction with the service quality of the car maintenance will positively influence the customer loyalty. After further examining the results about five factors of service quality, the cognitions with regard to the reliability and guarantee are found to significantly increase customer loyalty, and the satisfaction with the empathy of service quality also has a significant influence on customer loyalty. In addition, this study also found that car owners of HONDA are more accustomed to the maintenance service of original factory. In addition, their perceptions of importance and satisfaction as well as the cognitions of service quality are significantly different from those other brand. In terms of service quality satisfactions, HONDA owners are significantly more satisfied than the owners of other brands. According to the results of five factors, the cognitions of service quality perceived by HONDA owners is better than the owners of other brand. The results also show that HONDA owners liked to return to the original factory because the HONDA provide better service of repair and maintenance than other brands, which also leads to higher customer loyalty than other brands. Based on the above results, some management implications and suggestions are proposed to increase customer loyalty. They are: 1.The factories of car repair and maintenance should try to increase the degrees of customer satisfaction by improving individual dimensions of the service quality; 2.The factories of car repair and maintenance should try to increase customer loyalty by narrowing the gaps of cognition about each dimensions of service quality; 3.The factories of car repair and maintenance should strengthen the empathy dimension, which can significantly improve customer loyalty; 4.Some suggestions are also given to HONDA automakers for retaining old customers, including doing a good job in any aspect of car repair and maintenance service to increase customer satisfactions and creating a HONDA community to establish words of mouth so as to enhance customer loyalty for the repurchase intentions in the future. As to the future research suggestions, the sample number of surveys might be enlarged to have a better understanding about domestic consumers’ perceptions toward the service quality of car repair and maintenance as well as to compare the service quality of car maintenance plants among brands, which might help factories to understand what their customers need. Besides, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) can also be used to identify customers' priority in the maintenance and repair service. Other important variable such as trust is also suggested to add in the research model as a mediator or moderator to examine the relationships between service quality and customer loyalty.