When Engagement Fails to Bridge Trust: Customer Engagement as a Selective Mediator between Relationship Quality, Service Quality, and Loyalty in International Student Recruitment Agencies

Abstract

International student recruitment agencies (“education agents”) channel a large and growing share of cross-border enrolment, yet their customer relationships remain almost unstudied in services marketing. This study asks whether customer engagement mediates the effects of relationship-quality dimensions (satisfaction, trust, commitment, communication) and perceived service quality on customer loyalty in this distinctive, largely virtual context. Integrating relationship-marketing theory with the SERVQUAL paradigm, we test a model on survey data from 315 international students of six Yemeni-owned agencies in Malaysia (94.3% response rate) using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with bootstrapped mediation. Engagement significantly partially mediated the loyalty effects of satisfaction (indirect effect = 0.116), commitment (0.100), communication (0.045), and service quality (0.046), but—contrary to prior insurance and banking findings—did not mediate the trust–loyalty relationship (0.038, 95% CI [−0.071, 0.148], ns). We advance this trust null cautiously, as a falsifiable boundary-condition proposition rather than a settled law: in a predominantly online, low-familiarity service purchased once and at a distance, trust does not generate the engagement through which it would otherwise reach loyalty. Because the mediation was estimated antecedent-by-antecedent and key fit diagnostics await re-estimation, the proposition is offered for confirmation in a jointly specified replication. Findings indicate that agencies should build loyalty through satisfaction, commitment, communication, and service quality rather than trust-based engagement.