The impact of users’ characteristics on customer lifetime value raising: evidence from mobile data service in China

Abstract

Most prior studies on customer lifetime value (CLV) dominated on the effect of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty on customer profitability. However, how users' characteristics (i.e., self-construal, age and gender) affect CLV is rarely probed. In order to fill this research gap, in this study, we build a conceptual model integrating customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, CLV and customer characteristics variables to investigate the effect of users' self-construal characteristics and demographic features in the relationship between customer loyalty and CLV. In order to test the hypotheses suggested by our conceptual framework, focusing on the usage of mobile data services, we collected survey data from 875 customers provided by a major tele-communication service provider in China. We show that users' age, gender and self-construal have differing effects on CLV at different levels of customer loyalty. These results suggest that firms can manage customers with different age groups, gender and self-construal characteristics with different strategies to maximize benefits at different levels of customer loyalty to improve CLV.