Inertia, group conformity and customer loyalty in healthcare in the information age

What is it about?

Although patient loyalty to a health care provider has become a ‘key success factor’ in the increasingly competitive health care sector, previous research on patient loyalty has ignored some of its important influencing variables and has arrived at contradictory results. This research is the first to study the influence of inertia and group conformity on customer loyalty in health care, and the first to do so, in any service sector, from the perspective of Maslow's theory of human motivation. The study discovers that the strength of the impact of inertia (and of group conformity) on loyalty depends on the importance of the customer need that the service industry satisfies, in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This study has several implications to health care providers, regulatory authorities, patients and reference groups.

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