호텔레스토랑의 관계혜택과 핵심서비스혜택이 고객의 이탈의도에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study was intended to identify the major antecedent factors to customer satisfaction and then the structural relationships among customer satisfaction, attractiveness of alternatives, and customers' intentions to defect with the support of empirical evidence at a hotel restaurant. The research results on the hypotheses proposed may be summarized as follows. First, in the relationships between relational benefits and customer satisfaction, the subconstructs of confidence and social benefits were found to be statistically significant, but the subconstruct of special treatment benefits was found to be statistically insignificant. In the relationships between core service benefits and customer satisfaction, all the subconstructs of mood, employee service, and food and beverage quality were found to be statistically significant. The subconstructs of core service benefits were found to have a greater influence on customer satisfaction than those of relational benefits. Mood and employee service were found to be major determinants in customer satisfaction, with mood verified as the most influential one. Second, customer satisfaction was found to influence customers' intentions to defect directly and indirectly. Especially, customer satisfaction was identified as an important factor conducive to deterring customers from defecting indirectly by lowering attractiveness of alternatives. This finding verifies the role of attractiveness of alternatives as a mediating variable in contrast to its role suggested in prior research as a moderating variable between customer satisfaction and performance variables such as loyalty, relationship continuation and intentions to revisit. This study may be significant in that it complemented the problem of the omitted variable bias in prior research by including both core service benefits as well as relational benefits as the antecedent factors to customer satisfaction and identified which subconstruct in each antecedent factor affects customer satisfaction. In addition, it found that a decrease in attractiveness of alternatives owing to an increase in customer satisfaction may deter customers from defecting with the verification of attractiveness of alternatives as a mediating variable, rather than as a moderating role, between customer satisfaction and some performance variable.