職業認證培訓中客戶推薦意願的影響機制研究 – 以清暉項目管理PMP培訓為例

Abstract

In the first two decades of the 21st century, China's economic structure has transitioned towards high-quality development, allowing the service sector to gain more expansive room for growth. The vocational education and training industry, focusing on vocational qualification certification training and corporate management training, is thriving. Services such as project management, human resource management, and customized internal training for enterprises are attracting increasing attention, bringing vast development opportunities to the industry. With the homogenization of service products， the convergence of operational models，and the continuous rise in marketing costs, industry competition is becoming increasingly intense. Therefore, acquiring new clients has become a key focus for all training institutions, while recommendations from existing clients have become a relatively "shortcut." While research in the marketing field has been extensive in areas such as product pricing, media marketing, and customer relationship maintenance, the operational mechanism of the process from initial service enjoyment, to willingness to recommend, and ultimately to actual recommendation behavior is not entirely clear. Taking the PMP training of Changeway Project Management as an example, this study focuses on the research of the influencing mechanism of customer recommendation willingness in vocational certification training.

Based on the Social Exchange Theory and Motivation Theory, this study revolves around five variable factors: independent variable PMP teaching service standardization, dependent variable customer recommendation intention, mediating variables customer internal identity perception and customer satisfaction, and moderating variable organizational reward regulation. A research model is designed on the basis of existing studies. Through confirmatory factor analysis and common method bias test, it verifies that the key variables studied in this article have good discriminant validity, and the common method bias in the data of this study is within an acceptable range. By designing questionnaires, conducting surveys to collect sample data, and then analyzing the relevance of valid data, the study uses hierarchical regression analysis to test the research hypotheses, in order to examine the relationships among the variables influencing customer recommendation intention.

The results show that customers' internal self-perception has different effects on different forms of recommendation behaviors, but customer satisfaction simultaneously affects online and offline recommendation behaviors. External motivation, namely organizational incentives, can increase customer's willingness to recommend. The customer satisfaction resulting from standardized teaching services and the perceived internal identity of the customer can also increase the customer's willingness to recommend to a certain extent. However, organizational incentives weaken the relationship between standardized teaching services and willingness to recommend, and also weaken the effect of customer's perceived internal identity on the willingness to recommend. Therefore, external organizational incentive factors can enhance the customer's willingness to recommend to a certain extent, and to some degree, will increase organizational incentive factors, i.e., the role of internal motivation will be weakened by external motivation in the process of customer's recommendation intention. This is a major innovation in this study based on motivation theory.

The research findings verify the relationships among the variable factors influencing customer willingness to recommend in vocational certification training, supporting the importance of word-of-mouth marketing in vocational certification training. Standardized teaching services influence customers' online and offline recommendation intentions and behaviors through customer satisfaction and customers' internal self-perception. The external organizational rewards perceived by customers play a positive role in their willingness to recommend. However, what is practically significant for corporate word-of-mouth marketing is that there are several other factors that moderate and influence customers' online recommendation intentions and behaviors.

Date of Award	16 Jan 2024
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Mingping Yanni YAN (Supervisor) & Kai Yao (External Supervisor)