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With the increasing focus on customer relationships and profound impact that customer’s evaluative judgements exercise on customer loyalty, it is important to uncover the directional as well as moderating influences on customer loyalty formation. A complete understanding of type and strength of the relationship and their influencers would contribute in developing a comprehensive model that may not just clearly define the form and structure of relationship for future researches but also help industries in building loyalty and rationalize marketing expenditure. The present study aims to delineate the concept and significance of customer loyalty and offers a conceptual framework involving service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. A comprehensive survey of literature explored that customer satisfaction provides a directional influence to the relationship of service quality and customer loyalty and a mediation model integrating the relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is proposed for investigation. Furthermore, moderating effects on the service quality and customer loyalty link have been examined and four moderating variables namely, customer knowledge and expertise, price perceptions, service convenience and switching costs have been extracted from the literature. These variables need to be investigated to assess their role and strength in moderating the relationship between the two constructs.

The present paper seeks to offer the most decipherable and widely applicable antecedents of customer loyalty. It explores the extant literature on customer loyalty and brings out seven variableswhich are responsible for formation of customer loyalty. Further, the relative importance of these variables has been ascertained through Multiple Regression Analysis which revealed that service quality and commitment are the strongest predictors of customer loyalty in theIndian life insurance industry. The paper also attempts to assess the loyalty status of life insurance customers in India and draw a comparison between public and private sector life insurancecompanies in order to provide significant insights to the life insurance companies that may assist them in devising better loyalty practices. The findings suggest that Indian customers do care about the public sector status of a financial service provider as it entails a sense of security and stability and thus creates a difference between customer loyalty of public sector life insurerand that of private sector life insurer. The paper holds significant implications for academicians interested in dynamics of customer loyalty as well as the marketers of life insurance services whoare concerned with customer relationships

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