An Empirical Study on the Mediating Effect of Trust in the Service Quality – Customer Loyalty Relationship in the Malaysian Motor Insurance Industry
Motor insurance is one of the critical segment of the Malaysian non-life insurance eco-system. The merger and acquisition exercise within the industry, detariffication of the motor insurance premium couples with the sluggish global and local economy compel the motor insurance company to prioritise their strategy to boost the customer loyalty to achieve higher customer retention in ensuring business survival. Service quality which is the appraisal of the actual service received from insurance service provider against an expected service level, believed to play an essential part in nurturing customer loyalty. Further, the intangibility and credence nature of the insurance transaction place trust as the critical element towards the determination of customer loyalty. The primary objective of the research aimed to unveil the role of trust in mediating the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty. The study based on 399 motor insurance customer selected on purposive (judgemental) sampling approach through self-administrated questionnaire data collection. This quantitative research performed based on the Partial Least Square - Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) statistical approach through Smart PLS 3.0 software for data analysis. The finding revealed that service quality and trust had a significant positive influence on customer loyalty determination. Meanwhile, the research outcome also evident that trust has a partial mediation effect on service quality and customer loyalty among the Malaysian motor insurance customer. The research model which was constructed based on the Theory of Social Exchange capable of contributing towards the literature advancement and managerial impact in the area of customer loyalty for the credence financial services industry like non-life insurance. Lastly, the researchers presented the managerial implication from the finding of the research as well as the proposal for future research direction.