Customer loyalty is tested every day in the retail sector and the past years have been challenging for retailers to keep their existing, loyal customers. Covid-19 outbreak caused significant changes in consumers’ purchasing behavior because during the pandemic, consumers were forced to adapt new patterns of shopping which is likely to reflect also in customer loyalty. To better understand the temporal development of customer loyalty, we investigate how cognitive, affective, and social drivers of loyalty differ between 10,044 Trustpilot reviews before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic. We investigate customer loyalty in the retail sector using an objective and a novel approach; thus we based this study on user-generated content in the form of online reviews in contrast to the traditional survey-based measures of customer loyalty.

• Anna Kuikka(University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
• Heli Hallikainen(University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
• Tommi Laukkanen(University of Eastern Finland, Finland)
• Sasu Tuominen(University of Eastern Finland, Finland)