Relationship between service quality and attitudinal loyalty of bus passengers : mediating role of perceived value, customer satisfaction

Abstract

Previous research on service quality findings have indicated that in the transport sector service quality is a key factor effecting customer satisfaction and future consumption behaviour. However, when we attempt to measure the effect, we face three distinct issues. Firstly, no instrument with acceptable measurement properties to assess service quality of bus transport has been found in the literature. Another area of concern is misspecification of SERVQUAL as reflective-reflective higher order construct. Finally, ambiguity exists in the direction and magnitude of service quality effects on the outcome variables. This study has following five objectives to address the issues discussed above: (1) Adaptation of SERVQUAL instrument to measure perceived service quality in bus transport sector (2) conceptualize SERVQUAL as reflective-formative type higher order construct (3) develop the integrated service quality-attitudinal loyalty model (4) test the mediation effect of corporate image, perceived value, customer trust and customer satisfaction in the relationship between service quality and attitudinal loyalty and (5) to capture the unobserved heterogeneity in the chosen sample by testing the integrated model. Study 1 was used to adapt modify the SERVQUAL scale and further study 2 was conducted to test the proposed hypothesized relationships in the integrated model. An on-site survey was conducted at the central bus stand of the state capital on both weekdays and weekends using purposive sampling technique. To adapt modified SERVQUAL scale, principal component analysis, confirmatory factor analysis were performed and result shows the final version of the service quality adapted scale (modified SERVQUAL) contains 22 items under five dimensions namely, bus services (5 items), bus stand services (4 items), reliability (4 items), empathy (4 items) and staff behaviour (5 items) with sound psychometric property in viii terms of validity and reliability. In addition, Gap analysis was employed to measure the existing service quality of Tamil Nadu public transport corporation using perception vs expectation scores of the modified SERVQUAL scale. The results reveal that all the five dimensions of the service quality have obtained negative scores. It further suggests that the current level of service provided by the Tamil Nadu public transporters was not adequate and not meeting the expectation level of the passengers. The Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was carried out to examine the structural relationship between the service quality and attitudinal loyalty, when service quality is considered as a reflective- formative type construct. The result showed that the direct and indirect relationship of the integrated research model, except corporate image to attitudinal loyalty relationship, all other direct relationships are significant. In addition, perceived value, customer trust and customer satisfaction are partially mediating the relationship between service quality and attitudinal loyalty relationship. Finally, the unobserved heterogeneity is captured using FIMIX-PLS. Results indicated that two segment model is appropriate to capture the heterogeneity in the sample profile. The post hoc analysis is performed using Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (CHAID) to identify the explanatory variable in the homogeneous group without a priori information of group characteristics. The outcome shows that frequency of travel explained the segment membership (low and high frequent traveller). In addition, both high and low frequency travellers influence the performance of the model to varying degrees. It appears that the segment 2 model for high frequency travellers results in a greater change in attitudinal loyalty when compared to low frequency traveller model and global model. Theoretical and practical implications of the study and its limitation and suggestions for future research are discussed.