Estimating User Loyalty in Social Networking Services

Abstract

In the last few years, customer loyalty for products and services has become an object of extensive studies from researchers of various scientific fields. Its importance is justified from the fact that, in many cases, particularly in strong competition conditions, measuring customer satisfaction does not provide a reliable quality performance indicator for business organizations. According to recent research, loyalty is defined as a positive level of customers’ commitment, which should not be based only in previous purchases (repeated or not) of a product/service. This chapter presents the development of a multicriteria methodology aiming at measuring user loyalty in social networking services and estimating the importance of influencing factors. In this context, a multicriteria analysis approach is adopted in order to measure user loyalty, assuming that the overall commitment depends on a number of criteria. The applied multicriteria approach is based on the UTADIS method, and the presented results confirm the strong relation between user satisfaction and loyalty. The results, however, reveal also that satisfaction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for customer loyalty.