Research On The Influencing Factors Of Customer Referral Behavior Basing On Social Network

With the development of economy and the improvement of people’s living standard,customers occupy more and more initiative in market transactions. Enterprises have tobe customer-centric, focus on to maintain a good cooperation relationship with theircustomers, keep the old customers and attract new customers at the same time. Only so,they can attain a dominant position in the market and better adapt to market changes.Most customers would like to share their consume experience with other customersthrough informal communication, namely Word-of-Mouth communication or referral,this virtually brings considerable benefits to the enterprise and promotes theimprovement of its customer asset. Thus, word of mouth marketing begins to attract theenterprise attention in recent years. This is because word of mouth is the way of lowcost but high efficiency in getting new customers. Customer is not isolated individual,but set in different social networks. Previous research literatures did not analyze theeffects of network characteristics to CRB (customer referral behavior), this article willresearch and discuss the influencing factors of customer referral behavior from theperspective of social network.This article mainly analyzed the effect of five structure characteristics includingnetwork density, network center degrees, network condensed subgroup, network scaleand the network structure holes etc., two relation features including customer tocustomer relationship and customer to enterprise relationship. This article constructedthe conceptual model according to the proposed research hypotheses. We adjusted theresearch scale items on the basis of the reliability and validity analysis of180valid datathrough SPSS17.0and then completed the structure equation model fitting and fixed byAMOS17.0. We adjusted constantly upon the variables and influence paths through thesoftware of AMOS17.0, and got the model with relative perfect goodness-of-fit index.Finally, we calculated the direct and indirect effects of social network structure andrelationships characteristics to customer referral behavior, and we discuss the effects ofdifferent factors and put forward some marketing advices.