Impact of Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Switching Costs on Customer Loyalty

Abstract

This study examines the relationships and the impacts of service quality, customer satisfaction and switching costs on customer loyalty of e-banking in commercial banks. This study uses questionnaires with 7-point Likert scale to collect data from 227 e-banking users, who are mainly students and paid employees in Hanoi City, Vietnam. The collected data are analyzed by using multivariate linear regression method. The results show that all five factors of service quality in e-banking - reliability, responsiveness, service capacity, empathy and tangibility - have positive correlations with customer satisfaction. Among these determinants, service capacity and tangibility have the strongest impact. It means that, by increasing the quality of their services through five above factors, especially through improving capacity and tangibility, commercial banks can satisfy their customer better. In addition, customer satisfaction is strongly and positively correlated to customer loyalty. It means that, if customers are satisfied with e-banking services of one bank, they not only continue to do more businesses with this bank, but also recommend this bank to other people. Lastly, customer loyalty also has a strong and positive correlation with switching costs, which means customers tend to be loyal to one bank if the barriers to switching banks increase.