The Relationship of Customer Perceived Risk and Customer Satisfaction

Abstract

This article aims to address the relationship between customer's Perceived Risk and customer's satisfaction. In industries with high competition like the Airline industry, it is vital to know the customers' needs, in order to satisfy, and to keep them loyal. Moreover, this article aims to present a strategy by deal with influence of relationship marketing, brand image, and service quality to decrease customer's perceived risk and increase customer satisfaction. Hypotheses are tested on questionnaire data on 776 passengers of Iranian airlines in an International Airport. The data was then analyzed by Structural Equation Modeling. The results indicate that service quality, relationship marketing, and brand image are related with customer's perceived risk. In addition, strong negative correlation has been found between the perceived risk and customer's satisfaction. The results are limited to airline industry and data collected from one international airport. More examples of researches from other industries and gathering data from larger population will help generalization of suggested model. Managers need improvement of service quality, relationship marketing, and brand image in order to decreasing the customer's perceived risk and increasing customer's satisfaction in order to improve the firm's profitability and performance. This study contributes to the knowledge by empirical study in customer's perceived risk and customer's satisfaction relationship. Moreover, proposing an applicable model to reduce perceived risk and increase the customer's satisfaction will help scholars and practitioners. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n1s1p161