Determinants of Customer Loyalty in a Cloud Computing Environment

Abstract

This study's two objectives are first to assess the relationships between customer loyalty and potential determinants (customer satisfaction with the website, after sale customer service, and product return handling) in the special PaaS environment where users can produce a greater variety of website features compared to the more widely studied SaaS environment and second to test the impact of the website's customer decision support system as a potential moderator for the relationship between customer satisfaction with the website and customer loyalty. To test the hypotheses, 138 CC client organizations participated by collecting data from their website customers accessing their order entry website applications. The results confirmed the importance of the proposed relationships and enabled several important managerial insights, including the importance of client organization choosing the appropriate CC approach to improve customer loyalty to the website.