Abstract: In order to study the influence mechanism of service employees’ emotional intelligence on consumer loyalty, this paper constructs a theoretical model, which takes the emotional intelligence as the antecedent, service quality and customer satisfaction as the intermediary, and consumer loyalty as the result. The results indicate that customer emotion appraisal and use of emotion by the service employee can positively influence customer loyalty through service quality. Customer emotion appraisal and emotion adjustment can positively influence customer loyalty through customer satisfaction. The emotion adjustment would not produce significant influence on service quality, nor would the use of emotion produce any influence on customer satisfaction. Therefore, in order to improve customer loyalty, service enterprises should improve the service employees’ emotional intelligence by strengthening the recruitment and training of the employees and rationally allocating the service teams.

Key words: service employees; emotional intelligence; customer loyalty; service quality; customer satisfaction