Antecedents of Customer Satisfaction Affecting Broadband Loyalty

Abstract

Many customer satisfaction studies in the service industry use SERVQUAL, an instrument developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1998). Similarly, many studies on customer loyalty use the Net Promoter System™ (NPS®) developed by . Even though researchers acknowledge a relationship between satisfaction and loyalty, there is currently no empirical evidence demonstrating such relationship using SERVQUAL and NPS. In that regard, this study analyzed the antecedents of satisfaction measured by SERVQUAL that influence loyalty as measured by NPS in the context of the residential broadband service industry. To that effect, 208 broadband customers in the U.S. Midwest region were surveyed online. A confirmatory factor analysis confirmed the latent structure of collected data, validating the use of the five SERVQUAL factors as predictors. An ordinal logistic regression (OLR) model built on the collected data confirmed the existence of a statistically significant relationship between Empathy (one of the factors) and customer loyalty, suggesting that increasing empathy by one point increased the odds of becoming a promoter by 11.73%. The final model was validated using the Akaike information criterion (AIC), a single sample cross-validation model.