Trust, commitment, and customer knowledge

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to determine the influence of customer trust, religious commitment, customer’s knowledge on customer intimacy and its impact on relational commitment and repurchase intention, especially in Sharia banks in Indonesia. Design/methodology/approach This study was conducted in Sharia Banks in Jakarta Bogor, Tangerang Bekasi (Jabotabek) area. The population of this study covered all bank customers. Because of the large population, the researchers took samples of the population. The partial least square (PLS) analysis tool was also appropriate to be used to analyze data from smaller samples. In total, 100 respondents were selected using a snow bowling sampling technique in August–September 2017. Findings Higher customer trust enhances the customer intimacy. Stronger religious commitment also strengthens the customer intimacy. It has been confirmed that customer intimacy enhanced the relational commitment among clients in Sharia banks in Indonesia. The results show that high customer knowledge is able to encourage customer intimacy, and high customer intimacy is also able to encourage repurchase intention. On the other hand, it was found that customer knowledge was not directly able to increase the intention of repeat purchase. However, from the mediation test (indirect effect) is seen with high customer knowledge, supported by the high customer intimacy, it can indirectly increase the high repurchasing intention. Originality/value There are some research gaps that were considered as the theoretical foundation and research framework in this study. The focus of this study was on the role of customer intimacy in mediating the influence of trust and religious commitment on relational commitment. Based on the empirical review, this study attempted to develop customer intimacy antecedents by testing religious commitment, which becomes the originality of this study. This study was done based on some empirical results indicating that the antecedent of customer intimacy still varied while it needed to be immediately developed. Furthermore, the inconsistencies in the correlation between customer intimacy and relational commitment were later re-examined in the context of Islamic banks. It was assumed that the test would result in different findings as the test was done in a different countries and institutions.