Perceived administrative burden, customer dignity, perceived service impact, and resilient loyalty in retail banking

This study examines how customer-facing procedural friction in retail banking becomes relationally consequential for loyalty, moving beyond the utilitarian, satisfaction-centred explanations that dominate banking loyalty research. Grounded in administrative burden theory, it advances a procedural-relational pathway: rather than treating process costs as mere operational inconveniences or as parallel predictors of resistance, it specifies how learning, compliance, and psychological costs translate into loyalty-relevant relational judgments. A moderated serial model was tested in which perceived administrative burden is associated with weaker resilient loyalty through customer dignity and perceived service impact, with decision transparency and decision recourse conditioning the burden-to-dignity association. Cross-sectional survey data from 498 retail banking customers in Sichuan, China, were analysed using robust maximum-likelihood structural equation modeling in R. Perceived administrative burden was negatively associated with customer dignity, which was positively associated with perceived service impact, which in turn predicted resilient loyalty; the serial indirect association was significant. Decision transparency buffered the burden-to-dignity association, whereas decision recourse did not. The findings identify a mechanism whereby process friction erodes loyalty through customers’ felt standing and perceived influence over service delivery. The transparency–recourse asymmetry is cautiously interpreted as context-specific to a localized, branch-based banking setting and therefore requires further testing.