Marketing of Healthcare Services: Patient Satisfaction and Loyalty

The importance of customer loyalty is well recognized by service organizations and they are continuously striving to maintain their base of loyal customers. Loyal customers are profitable customers are profitable customers and generate revenue by purchasing more, more often, a wider range and by recommending new customers and as such deserve special consideration from the firms. Much attention has been given to this aspect in the literature. However much more needs to be done in this area. As an effort to make a small contribution in this area, the researcher took up the present study and has made an effort to delineate the determinants of loyalty in health care service. There are already a few studies reported in literature dealing with factors affecting loyalty; however this does not comprise an exhaustive list of determinants of loyalty, specifically when it comes to health care service. This study therefore delineates the determinants of loyalty in health care service, identifies the underlying dimensions of determinants of loyalty and tests which of these are significant dimensions of loyalty.