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Introduction
In the contemporary global and highly competitive economy it is fatal for a business organization to be non-customer-oriented. Indeed, to survive organizations need to produce products and services of very good quality that yield highly satisfied and loyal customers ([12] Fecikova, 2004). For many years customer satisfaction has been a major goal of business organizations, since it has been deemed to affect customer retention and companies' market share ([17] Hansemark and Albinsson, 2004). Traditionally, satisfied customers have been thought of as less price sensitive, less influenced by competitors, buying additional products and/or services and staying loyal longer ([48] Zineldin, 2000). Yet, in 1991 the Xerox Corporation made a surprising - and disquieting - discovery. It was found that "satisfied" customers were not behaving the way they were expected: they were not coming back to Xerox to repurchase ([29] McCarthy, 1997, p. 13). "Merely satisfying customers, who have the freedom to make choices, is not enough to make them loyal," [25] Jones and Sasser (1995) observed in their own analysis of the Xerox study. "The only truly loyal customers are totally satisfied customers". Hence, the Xerox study shed new light on what had previously been relatively unexplored territory: the link between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Loyalty of customers is considered to be a function of satisfaction ([12] Fecikova, 2004, p. 57) and loyal customers contribute to company profitability by spending more on company products and services, via repeat purchasing, and by recommending the organization to other consumers ([6] Bowen and Chen, 2001; [12] Fecikova, 2004). To further understand the behavior of loyal customers, recent research has attempted to integrate the concept of customer commitment ([14] Fullerton, 2005; [49] Zins, 2001). For the most part, these recent studies have been built upon customer commitment as a key mediator of the relationship between the customer's evaluations of a firm's performance and the customer's intentions regarding the future relationship with the firm ([14] Fullerton, 2005). The present paper explores the nature of interrelationships among customer satisfaction, loyalty and commitment in Greek service organizations. First a brief synthesis of the extant literature on key conceptual and operational issues is offered, followed by an outline of the research questions under study and the method used for the collection of...