The effects of service quality, university reputation, student satisfaction and islamic attributes on student loyalty

Abstract

As time passes, competitions among businesses are increasing very much. Businesses are trying many methods to safeguard themselves against these severe competitions, which reduce a firm’s revenue as well as profitability. Firms are trying to invest more to know their customers better in order to serve them better and in order to retain them for a long period of time. Retaining customers is cheaper for the firms than attracting new customers. Also by knowing customers better and serving them better than competitors, will make the customers loyal to a firm. This loyalty is a tool that firms use to protect them against their competitors. This study focuses more on Muslim student perceptions about their loyalty in their higher educational institutions in the Klang Valley area. Thus, the causal relationships between different constructs will be analysed to better understand what affects student loyalty. This study is an empirical one, focusing on data collected from students through self-administered questionnaires at their higher education institution based on convenience sampling method. 404 questionnaires were used for data analysis. Data is analysed through SPSS and SmartPLS, which are social statistics software used for data analysis. The findings suggest that service quality did not have any effect on student loyalty whereas the student satisfaction, corporate reputation of the institution as well as Islamic attributes of the institutions affected student loyalty. We can see from this research that the Islamic attributes as well as other factors like corporate reputation and satisfaction are important elements that affect student loyalty with its institution. More importantly, educational institutions that try to attract Muslim students should focus more on the Islamic attributes. The main limitation of this study is that data was collected only from a few institutions. According to the researcher knowledge, this is the first empirical study that focuses on Islamic attributes among higher education students.