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Rationally, every organization would want to achieve its short- and long-term market and financial targets to ensure growth. Growth in an organization is often a reflection of market success, more often in terms of sustainable customer patronage and market share. It is argued that sustainable market success and organizational growth in the services sector is based on customer satisfaction that serves as a foundation of customer loyalty and retention (Gustafsson et al., 2005; and Ganiyu, 2012), where service quality is the root of customer satisfaction (Agyapong, 2011; and Angelova and Zekiri, 2011). Though service quality, customer satisfaction and customer retention are popular topics in marketing literature and are important to managements, in practice, attainment of customer retention is often of a relatively higher priority to organizations owing to its long-term effect on marketing and the organization at large (Gan et al., 2006; and Keiningham et al., 2006). Primarily, efforts to achieve service quality in service organizations are geared towards customer retention.
Customer retention is viewed by marketers as the grand result of service quality (Gan et al., 2006; and Angelova and Zekiri, 2011). Invariably, customers’ perceived service quality is a precursor to customer retention. Some writers also identify it as a measure of the sustainability of patronage in the market (Kheng et al., 2010; and Keiningham et al., 2014). In this respect, Kheng et al. (2010) contend that customer retention is the final market indicator of success in terms of how sustainable customer patronage is.
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