A study on exploring the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty in the fast food industry: With relationship inertia as a mediator

Abstract

The impact of negative news on fast food industry customers is often short and weak. Therefore, this study suspects whether other important variables exist in fast food industry consumer behavior patterns to support this result. This study tries to combine variables that are related to fast food industry characteristics, such as consumption frequency, perceived price and convenience, to propose an integrated model of customer satisfaction and loyalty in the fast food industry, and apply relationship inertia as the mediator to discover the major factors that impact customer satisfaction and loyalty in the fast food industry. This study has collected 594 effective questionnaires and applied structural equation modeling (SEM) to verify the various path relations of the study model. The study result found that in addition to being positively impacted by customer satisfaction, customer loyalty will be impacted by customer relationship inertia more. In the relationship of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, customer relationship inertia plays a key mediator. In addition, perceived price has a negative impact on customer satisfaction and relationship inertia. Convenience will enhance customer satisfaction. Consumption frequency will enhance customer relationship inertia. Finally, this study expects to provide the study result to the fast food industry as a reference for enhancing the customer loyalty strategy. Key words: Customer satisfaction, relationship inertia, customer loyalty, convenience, perceived price.