BUILDING E-LOYALLTY, SATISFACTION AND TRUST BY ENHANCING ONLINE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN SRI LANKAN E-COMMERCE PLATFORMS

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study aimed to analyze several aspects with customer experience, and its relationship to Sri Lankan customers’ e-loyalty. Customer experience is a substantial and comprehensive concept, where we decided to narrow the research to investigate the following aspects; privacy, ease of use, security and user interface quality. Hence, we suggest which factors that have an impact on customer loyalty with online stores. In addition, we included two mediators; satisfaction and trust, for assessing any mediating effect on the relationship between the customer experience factors and e-loyalty. Through our in-depth interviews, we found results suggesting that the customers are relatively secure and are trusting the online stores when purchasing. In addition, the respondents from the in-depth interviews reported that the user-friendliness of the digital platform, is an important factor when purchasing, and it might have an effect on the consideration of repurchase. Based on the findings from the literature and past researches, we managed to develop a model which includes the relationships between customer experience, satisfaction, and e-loyalty. In order to test the model, we conducted a quantitative research through an online survey, where we received 153 valid answers. The quantitative research describes a positive relationship between all of our customer experience factors towards e-loyalty. This indicates that Privacy, ease of use, security and user interface quality have a causal relationship to and an impact on customer e-loyalty. However, we found only satisfaction to have a significant mediating effect in the relationship between ease of use, security and user interface quality and e-loyalty. Having satisfaction as a mediator, all of the explanatory power for the representative factors and e-loyalty has been increased. This tested model can be utilized to enhance the customer loyalty within online stores in Sri Lanka. We developed a prototype of e-commerce platform where the output results from the customer experience model is used as a measure of e-loyalty. Hence, e-loyalty us being enhanced.