The role of communication and trust in explaining customer loyalty

Loyalty has, over the past decade, become a crucial construct in marketing, and particularly in the burgeoning field of customer relationship management. This paper shows that customer loyalty can be explained to a substantial degree by customer satisfaction, trust, and communication, and shows the direct and indirect effects among those constructs and other constructs in an extension of the European Customer Satisfaction Index (ECSI) model. Both ECSI model and the extended model are estimated with data from a survey carried out among customers of the banking sector. Within the limitations of the study, the theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.