How Excellent Experiences affect Customer Loyalty: The Effect of Customer Experience Quality and Product Quality on Perceived Value and Customer Loyalty Intentions

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: 1,3, Maastricht University (School of Business and Economics), language: English, abstract: Abstract The thesis at hand develops a new scale to measure customer experience quality on the basis of four dimensions: service quality, atmosphere quality, flow quality, and learning quality. The American coffee company Starbucks is used as exemplary case to validate the theory empirically. Product quality is found to be a separate, but related construct to customer experience quality. The author investigates the effect of customer experiences on customer loyalty and finds that customer experience quality indirectly affects customer loyalty intentions through perceived value. The relative importance of customer experience quality for perceived value and in succession customer loyalty intentions is found to be much higher than that of product quality. Moreover, perceived wealth of the customer acts as a moderator and increases the positive effect of customer experience quality on perceived value wheras it weakens the effect of product quality on perceived value. Collectively, the results extend and clarify concepts in the evolving, but inconsistent customer experience literature. The findings enable managers to stage customer experiences more effectively and more efficiently.