Private health insurance customer satisfaction. A consumer behavior exploratory study based on structural equation modeling

In the glocalization context, private health insurance local and international companies invested in Romania for over two decades, nevertheless the private health insurance adoption rate in the country was the lowest in the region. The purpose of this research is to analyze and understand the phenomena behind private health insurance customer satisfaction, designing a cognitive model and identifying the functional relationships between elements. The literature review provides various models that are related to customer satisfaction, from buying decision process to the relationships between perceived values, service consequence and expected service values that determines customer satisfaction. The developed conceptual model in six dimensions, including the output variable block for customer satisfaction, was the base for developing the research questionnaire. Developed on a structural equation modeling approach, the quantitative research results depict how customer satisfaction is mediating private health insurance and consumer behavior. Consequently, a private health insurance provider needs to adapt its products to increase people’s motivation to purchase such a product and, after the acquisition, to improve the covered services to increase the beneficiaries’ level of satisfaction. The generic contribution this paper brings is to present the private health insurance industry valences for Romania in the years 2017-2019 and the relationship between the product attributes, Customer Behavior and Consumer Satisfaction.