Are Customer Service Offerings Influencing E-Loyalty? A Graphical Chain Model Approach in the Austrian Mobile Phone Service Provider Industry

Customer loyalty is seen as one of the key factors of a company's success. According to current research results, a necessary premise among others to gain customer loyalty is how the customers perceive the customer service. In the field of B2C e-commerce online customer support areas are used to fulfill parts of this support duty. It is an open question how big the impact of the online customer support on the customer loyalty is. The goal of this paper is to determine, which factors are influencing e-loyalty significantly. Two factors are used to measure loyalty: positive word-of-mouth and switching probability. In the first part a brief overview of the actual scientific work and recent research results are given. After this, the methods and data acquiring steps are described. The results of the so gained data are presented and interpreted. Based on these results, the conclusion and further research recommendations complete this work.