Understanding customer’s expectations regarding school reputation are essential to creating strategies to reach the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. In particular, Vietnam's secondary education system is a potential sector for researchers to invest in with the innovation in implementing public and private schools in the education system in recent years. Over the past few years, parents - as customers in the education system, are getting more and more attention to school reputation. Over the past few years, parents - as customers in the education system, are getting more and more attention to school reputation. This study aims to analyze whether the school's reputation has an impact on the satisfaction, feedback, and loyalty of Vietnamese secondary student's parents or not. Full paper: “Parents as Customers: The Influence of School Reputation on Satisfaction, Feedback, and Loyalty of Vietnamese Secondary Students’ Parents” is published on Corporate Reputation Review (2022).

Customer loyalty is defined as a positive attitude with organizations that commit to continue to buy products or services and recommend them to others. Loyalty has been also widely examined in education sector. Parent - is known as the role of customers in the education sector - the one who has power with the development of the institutions. In the educational context, parent’s loyalty was described as the commitment to send their children to their preferred school in the future and providing positive recommendations about the school for other parents.

Reputation is defined as the identity of an organization that represents the quality of products and services to customers. Parents are known as the most crucial stakeholder of secondary school as the payer and selector for the education service. It is essential for a school’s manager to raise the school's reputation to satisfy the requirements and needs of the parents. 

Customer satisfaction has a significant impact on customer loyalty. The relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty is prominent not only in the business sector but also in the education sector.

Customer feedback has both direct and indirect effects on the institutional abilities to raise the quality and bring satisfaction to customers. In this research, feedback is defined as information that customers provide to the organization. In this definition, both negative and positive comments can provide helpful information for the institutions to reach the needs and demands of customers in order to satisfy them. In reality, regardless of the content of feedback (negative or positive), it is the willingness to give feedback of parents that affirms the engagement between them and the schools whose are more responsive are more effective in resolving and listening to parents’ feedback can improve their service quality quicker than their competitors.

The online survey was collected from January 2020 till April 2020. Follow-up emails were issued every two weeks to remind individuals who had not yet completed the survey to finish it. The data collection process concluded in April 2020 with a sample size of 239 respondents. Applying SEM method, in overall, this study indicated that parent’s satisfaction has the strongest direct impact on parent’s feedback and loyalty. However, when total impact is taken into consideration, reputation is revealed to have a higher impact on feedback and loyalty than satisfaction. Given these results, this study suggests schools’ leaders have both strategies to enhance satisfaction and reputation simultaneously. Obviously, strategies focusing on satisfaction and reputation are different. The former requests schools’ leaders to look on “internal factors” such as core educational quality (e.g., pedagogy, curriculum), transformational education quality, facilities and infrastructure. Meanwhile, latter requests schools’ leaders to look on their own “internal factors” but also other school competitors. It’s because the fact that reputation is a relative concept. Reputation of a given school should be measured under a comparison with other schools.

Originated from

Nguyen, T. T., Cao, T. Q., Phung, H. T. T. et al. (2023). Parents as Customers: The Influence of School Reputation on Satisfaction, Feedback, and Loyalty of Vietnamese Secondary Students’ Parents. Corp Reputation Rev 26, 167-178 (2023).

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41299-022-00144-w

AUTHORS FROM VNU UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS

Phung Thi Thu Huong is doing her PhD in Finance - Banking in VNU University of Economics Business. Her major researches are finance and banking, personal finance, consumer behaviors and business law.