Does Customer Knowledge Affect How Loyalty is Formed?

The authors first propose and test a cognitive-affective-conative baseline model: Perceived service quality (both tangible company-related and employee-related factors) is modeled antecedent to satisfaction and trust, which in turn are antecedents to customer loyalty responses (word of mouth and traditional loyalty). These relationships are then hypothesized to be moderated by high versus low knowledge, a moderation based on central versus peripheral processing. The results show that employee service quality has a greater impact than company service quality on trust and on satisfaction in both knowledge groups. The relationship of trust to word of mouth is both direct and indirect through satisfaction for both knowledge groups, but the relationship of trust to loyalty is both direct and indirect through satisfaction only for the high-knowledge group; for the low-knowledge group, the relationship of trust to loyalty is indirect only, through satisfaction.