THE INFLUENCE OF PERCEIVED EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE ON THE PERCEIVED SERVICE VALUE AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY

As competition is increasing both locally and globally, more and more organisations face the need to preserve their customers while minimising preservation and marketing costs. Through an empirical analysis of customers of a logistics service provider in Israel, it is argued that service providers can intelligibly influence customers' impression and the emotional experience they get through the service provision interaction. Moreover, if this impression is positive, customers perceive an incremental value in the service interaction and tend to develop a long-lasting commitment to the organisation which can develop into loyalty. In general, this rationale is validated by the research. In addition, it was discovered that price is not the main element of customer loyalty; even its role is found to be less dominant than the role of emotion. Implication and projections for further studies are also discussed in the paper.