Till 2012, a lot of mega vessel more than 8,000 TEU will be put into world-wide major shipping routes, which means ‘supply’ will exceed ‘demand’ in shipping industry market in the near future. Service quality management could be a great source of competitive advantage for the shipping companies faced with this kind of the dynamic change of the environment. For customers, it could have an effect on the strategic choice of the shipping company.
The purpose of this empirical study is to examine and explore the relationships between three variables
more generalized model needs to be developed for evaluation of the service quality and the ways of the measurement of service quality should be more elaborated.
service quality, customer satisfactions and customer loyalty, statistical analysis was used with tools of SPSSWIN ver 15.0 and AMOS ver 7.0.
For effective study, many thesis have been obtained through literature survey. However, major results were compiled from directly structured questionnaire, which were collected from Korean import/export companies and freight forwarders.
Major findings could be summarized as follows.
First, the five components of service quality of SERVPERF were rearranged into three components of service quality(expanded conception of tangibles, reliability, assurance). Original 11 hypothesis reduced to 7 hypothesis and out of these rearranged seven, 5 were supported and 2 were not supported.
Second, correlations between service quality and customer satisfaction are found to be positive except service quality component of 'reliability' with customer satisfaction. Correlations between service quality and customer loyalty are found to be positive except service quality component of 'tangibles' with customer loyalty.
Third, correlation between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is found to be positive even in some previous researches of other similar logistic industries, no correlations were found.
This study shows some suggestions for the future research
shipping companies' service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Special features of this study could be summarized as following.
First, this is empirical study based on market research according to the definition of 'customer' as freight forwarders and actual exporter/importer together contrary to previous studies.
Second, to evaluate shipping companies' service quality, 5 components of SERVPERF model was used.