A theoretical model to investigate customer loyalty on logistics service providers for sustainable business performance

Abstract

A business exists because of its customers and is sustained because of customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is repeat purchase and represents business sustainability. This paper develops a conceptual model to investigate the factors affecting customer loyalty towards the third party logistics (3PLs) service provider involving factors such as logistics service quality (LSQ) and customer satisfaction. A total of 174 feedbacks were received from the distributed 1,000 questionnaires. SmartPLS 2.0 was applied to these data to test the relationships among the variables in the study. The results indicate LSQ is an antecedent to customer satisfaction while customer satisfaction mediates between LSQ and loyalty. The results also reveal procedural switching costs moderate the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This paper has extended the cognitive-affective-conative theory to supply chain/logistics studies.