The effect of customer satisfaction and inertia on customer loyalty formation process: An implication in food and beverage companies

Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are the factors effecting the operations of tourism companies. Customer satisfaction happens when customer expectations are met. Besides the attitudinal dimension, customer loyalty is the repeating buying behavior in higher quantities toward a company. In the process of customer loyalty formation, customer satisfaction and inertia are both effective. Inertia is the lazy, inactive or passive behavior of the customer to a company. The study was based on Oliver(1997)?s four-stage loyalty model. In this model, loyalty comprises of cognitive, affective, conative and action loyalty.The main purpose of this study is to determine the effects of customer satisfac-tion and inertia to customer loyalty process in food and beverage companies. Additio-nally, the differences of customer loyalty and customer satisfaction in terms of demog-raphic characteristics and inertia levels were identified.In order to analyze the effects, a new model based on Oliver(1997)?s model was developed. By this means, for food and beverage companies, it would be possible to understand the factors that affect customer loyalty formation process and develop stra-tegies to carry on activities in a competitive environment.The population of study was the restaurant customers in Çeşme, İzmir. Data was collected with questionnaire from 377 customers to represent the population and analy-zed with t-test, one-way ANOVA, cluster analysis and structural equation modeling.The results of the study indicate that customer satisfaction and inertia had positi-ve effects on the customer loyalty process. There are significant differences in inertia according to sexuality and there are significant differnces in customer satisfaction, cog-nitive, affective, conative loyalty according to education level of customers. When the customers are grouped in two with respect to their inertia levels(high and low inertia), there are significant differences between groups in customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. The group with high inertia level had more satisfaction and loyalty than the lower one.In the conclusion, considering the relationship between customer loyalty, custo-mer satisfaction and inertia, suggestions are made to increase satisfaction and loyalty for restaurants.