BUILDING LOYALTY CREATING VALUE THROUGH CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

A review of the academic and practitioner literature on customer relationship management indicates a general consensus that quality, value, and satisfaction are critical variables in explaining customer loyalty in services, yet, although much is known about the relationship between the aforementioned variables and customer loyalty, they don’t fully explain how customer loyalty is built? This paper argues that one critical variable has been excluded from consideration that impacts on customer loyality, explicitly customer experiences. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to rectify this significant gap in the literature and present relatively new perspective of customer loyality that recognises that the customer has to interact with the components of a service in order for the service to become ‘real’ (Echeverri 2005) and that the successful management of customer experiences leads to a differentiated competitive advantage (Smith and Wheeler 2002). This paper proposes a preliminary conceptual model for building customer loyalty, one which incorporates the critical variable customer experiences and presents a number of propositions. This new approach has moved away from the typical loyalty building models and now incorporates all four critical variables, experiences, quality, value and satisfaction. These are significant variables in determining customer loyalty and to the best of our knowledge have not been collectively examined before. Due to the scarcity of research and interest in this area, it is perceived that this study will not only contribute substantially to academic knowledge in this area but will also make a significant contribution to tourism practice – informing practitioners on the criticality of the customer experience in building customer loyalty