Abstract

Due to the diversification of the food industry and its heightened competition, the marketing strategy to be required the most would be to improve competitiveness by enhancing customer loyalty as a resulting variable of customer satisfaction. Thus, this study, taking a food service provider as a subject, is to find factors and the scope of the perceived quality ; and to analyze how far the perceived service quality factor as such could explain customer's overall satisfaction and customer loyalty ; finally to provide basic data for establishing a customer satisfaction marketing strategy as related to customer loyalty. The results of the study are as below. 1) 25 factors of service quality perceived by a food service provider have been categorized into 8 independent dimensions through factor analysis. Each of them are named 'Employee attitude', 'Cleanliness', 'Reputation', 'Reliability', 'Food', 'Price', 'Convenience', 'Variety', all of which explain 64.3% of the service again quality perception level. 2) After classifying customers into 3 groups according to two criteria -"will buy the service again" and "will suggest it to others" and making a pair of service providers with each customer, each customer loyalty group compared the service quality perception factor of the food service provider. The result was that the group having both the "will buy the service again" and "will suggest to others" criteria, that is, with higher loyalty, tend to have higher points than other group s in the dimension of 'Employee attitude' and 'Cleanliness'(p<0.05), which means these two dimensions are closely related to customer loyalty. 3) From a regression analysis for the service quality perception level of the food service provider and overall satisfaction, it has been found that : the regression models are different for each group, that 'Employee attitude' seems to be related more closely to the group with higher loyalty(p<0.05); that the 'Price' dimension is found to be a meaningful factor to the group categorized not having "will buy the service again" and "will suggest to others" criteria(p<0.05).

• Keywords: customer loyalty; service provider; restaurant; perceived service quality