Optimizing last-mile delivery in furniture logistics: A data-driven study on customer trust, perception, and retention

This study examines what drives customers to choose — and stay with — third-party logistics (3PL) providers for last-mile furniture delivery in Thailand. While service quality and trust are widely assumed to be the key determinants of customer evaluation, we question whether this holds in a premium, high-contact delivery context where customers already walk in with high expectations. Drawing on Expectation-Disconfirmation Theory (EDT), Service-Dominant Logic (SDL), and Relationship Marketing Theory, we develop and test an integrated model in which SERVQUAL, trust building, and customer engagement and retention shape customer perception, which in turn drives behavioral intention. Survey data from 400 respondents in Thailand were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results show that service quality and trust do not significantly improve customer perception — consistent with EDT’s hygiene factor prediction — while engagement and retention emerged as the dominant driver, supporting SDL’s relational value co-creation logic. Customer perception strongly predicted behavioral intention. Beyond the empirical findings, the study contributes theoretically by demonstrating that SERVQUAL and trust-based frameworks have important boundary conditions in premium logistics contexts, and that relational engagement is where competitive differentiation actually happens.