Clinical laboratory customers’ loyalty: development and validation of a measuring instrument.

Abstract

Background: clinical laboratories are in a competitive environment and, therefore, need to measure customer loyalty and then build effective customer retention strategies to outperform rivals.This study aims to develop and validate an instrument to measure customer loyalty in a clinical laboratory.Methods: Churchill's paradigm was adopted for developing a new customer loyalty measuring instrument.The conceptual model was checked for reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).Results: customer loyalty has a three-dimensional structure consisting of normative commitment, affective commitment, and continuance commitment.Cronbach's alpha coefficients (0.929, 0.919, and 0.917) of the latent variables were greater than 0.8, which confirms the high reliability of the model.Indicator loadings were all greater than the threshold of 0.7.Also, all the latent variables have average variance extracted (AVE) greater than 0.5 achievings, therefore, convergent validity.Both the Maximum Shared Variance (0.195, 0.297, and 0.234) and the Average Shared Variance (0.828, 0.748, and 0.840) were lower than the AVE (0.910, 0.865, and 0.916) for all the constructs in the scale.Hence, Discriminant validity has been achieved.Fit indices used to assess CFA and structural equation model were found to be at an acceptable level for the two-factor model according to Kline criteria (χ 2 /df = 1.30, p= 0.579, GFI = 0.95, AGFI= 0.90, SRMR= 0.033, RMSEA= 0.012, CFI= 0.94, NFI= 0.98, RFI= 0.98, IFI= 0.98, TLC= 0.97). Conclusion:The instrument demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties and, therefore, it fits to measure customer loyalty