Online Customer Experience: What Factors Influence Loyal Customers in an Online Environment?

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze several aspects with customer experience, and its relationship to Norwegian customers’ e-loyalty. Customer experience is a substantial and comprehensive concept, where we decided to narrow the research to investigate the following aspects; service quality, ease of use, security and cocreation. Hence, suggesting 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- and customer friendliness of the digital platform, is an important factor when purchasing, and it might have an effect on the consideration of repurchase. 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 service quality, ease of use, security and co-creation 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 co-creation and e-loyalty. Having satisfaction as a mediator, increased all of the explanatory power for the representative factors and e-loyalty. Based on the findings from this research, we managed to develop a model which includes the relationships between customer experience, satisfaction, and e-loyalty. This model can be utilized to enhance the customer loyalty within online stores.