Malaysian Motor Insurance Industry: Quality, Fair, Satisfactory, Gratified and Trusted Relationship Exchange on Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is critical for success and sustainable business performance for all corporation and is even vital in the case of non-life insurance industry where the products offer is highly credence, intangible and complex. The industry deregulation, changing customer behaviour, and sluggish economy spiral the insurance customer switching behaviour, which seriously eroding customer loyalty. The prime objective of this study is to examine the interplay effect of service quality, service fairness, relationship satisfaction, gratitude and trust on customer loyalty among the motor insurance policyholder in Malaysia. It was conducted based on 399 respondents, selected on convenience sampling approach and employed Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique. The principal findings showed that all the constructs understudied have a significant relationship with trust and trust found significantly and positively relates to customer loyalty among the motor insurance customer in Malaysia. Further, trust and relationship satisfaction played a partial mediator role in the determination of customer loyalty. In addition, it demonstrate the importance of trust as the satisfying relationship exchange together with the fairness perception and gratitude feeling in elevating and enhancing customer loyalty. These results delineated the offering of quality service or fairness of treatment by the insurer will not be necessary to achieve higher customer loyalty. The findings also offer useful and practical insights for insurance industry players and policymakers for effective customer retention and relationship management strategy. This study is considered as the first attempt to theoretically integrates the variable of service quality, service fairness, relationship satisfaction, gratitude and trust together with customer loyalty in a holistic and integrated framework to examine their interdependency influence. Moreover, it also contribute to the enrichment of scarce relationship marketing literature for credence services such as Malaysian non-life insurance industry.