A Study of the Factors Influencing Customer Loyalty: A Case Study of Thai Airways

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the factors influencing the customer loyalty in a case of Thai Airways. The customer loyalty is an essential element for a company to survive from the furious competition among its competitors. For a airline company such as Thai Airways, enhancing the customer loyalty is one the most efficient strategy to achieved success in airline industry. As the number of loyal customer increases, a company will achieve more benefits during the running of its business, in terms of market share, market position, and profit. There are many factors which impact the customer loyalty in a significant way. The author studied four factors in this paper, which were service quality, complaint handling, corporate image and customer satisfaction. The objectives of this paper were to investigate about the impact of service quality, complaint handling, corporate image and customer satisfaction on customer Loyalty; to investigate about the influence of service quality, complaint handling, and corporate image on customer satisfaction; and to confirm the previous studies about the customer loyalty within airline industry and the factors which have influence on it. This paper was a descriptive research. In this paper, the method applied to do the research was Sample Survey Technique which is known as questionnaire. 400 Thai Airways customers were chosen to do the questionnaire. The sampling procedure of this paper applied judgment sampling and convenience sampling. Pearson Correlation Coefficient was used to investigate the strength of association between dependent and independent variables. After data analysis, the all of the relationships in the hypotheses were confirmed and supported. The strongest relationship was found between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, which indicated that the customer satisfaction has significant impact on customer loyalty. These results supported the study of Yap et al.; Hallowell, Lam and Burton; Ball et al; Kim; and Bendall-Lyon and Powers, in which the great positive influence of customer satisfaction on customer loyalty was verified.