Understanding the mediating effect of cognitive and emotional satisfaction on customer loyalty

Abstract

Studies have proven that businesses have to incur new and additional cost in order to attract new customers as compared to retaining existing customers. Retaining loyal customers are crucial as they eventually contribute to the increase in business organization's revenue and are more likely to occur in a form of word-of-mouth (WOM). In the compound and vibrant Malaysian home computer retail market today, customer loyalty (CL) through word-of-mouth marketing tends to occur very slowly and is limited geographically but is a very potent method of marketing. The influence of cognitive and emotional satisfaction on the relationship between salesperson presentation skills and CL through intention to promote by WOM is vital. This will then lead to increased benefits for the organization in the form of CL. The cognitive evaluation of customer satisfaction (CS) was found to explain CL in a retail setting more than the emotional reaction. This finding holds importance to those retailers who have been able to generate high expectations in the eyes of their customers.