Parents as Customers: The Influence of School Reputation on Satisfaction, Feedback, and Loyalty of Vietnamese Secondary Students’ Parents

Understanding customer’s expectations regarding school reputation are essential to creating strategies to reach the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. In particular, Vietnam's secondary education system is a potential sector for researchers to invest in with the innovation in implementing public and private schools in the education system in recent years. Over the past few years, parents—as customers in the education system, are getting more and more attention to school reputation. This study aims to analyze whether the school's reputation has an impact on the satisfaction, feedback, and loyalty of Vietnamese secondary student's parents or not. The study also considers the effects of moderating variable as that is parent’s age while analyzing causal relationships above. The research was carried out in secondary schools in Vietnam, using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to establish and moderating effect to verify factors with 230 respondents in the surveys. The results show support for the model between school reputation and parents' satisfaction, loyalty, and feedback, as well as moderating effects of parent’s age would indicate the relationship between reputation—feedback, satisfaction—feedback, reputation—loyalty, and satisfaction—loyalty. Related findings and practical implications are explored.