An investigation into the relationship between customer relationship marketing and customer retention: superstore retailing context in Bangladesh

The context of this study is Bangladesh`s food retailing sector. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) and customer retention. The core aim of Relationship Marketing is to build long lasting mutually bonded relationships with customers and various other important stakeholders. The concept has attracted considerable attention among scholars in recent decades and has appeared in service marketing literature as a new marketing paradigm. The concept is critical to the success of any organisation as it has been an accepted phenomenon that maintains that existing customers are far easier to retain than is the process of acquiring new customers. In order to stay in business and cope with the challenging business dynamism, organisations are continuously searching for reliable and serviceable strategies to be employed in order to increase customer retention. However, there is a lack of consensus among researchers on the core antecedents of relationship marketing that can be used to achieve the above aims, especially while the concept is new in the context of organised retailing sectors in Bangladesh. In response, the study developed a conceptual framework of customer retention strategy which incorporates bonds, service quality and relational quality into one relationship model. The model establishes eleven hypotheses. A sample of 202 grocery food retail customers were selected in a random sample from four selected superstores. The results support hypothesized relationships built on the model. The findings indicate that service quality, trust, bond and customer satisfactions are vital for creating positive customer loyalty which in turn creates customer retentionPeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Using a priori algorithm for supporting e-commerce system

The Internet technology has brought about a significant impact in doing business. It promotes the new way of doing business by enabling new system such as electronic commerce (e-commerce) to the worldwide users. Currently, the e-commerce system does not only provide electronic transactions like online payment, electronic cart shopping and ordering, and online tracking, but it must also be able to support a good relationship with their customers by providing a creative way in its business operations. It is because of many organizations having to maintain their customers by serving a good customer satisfaction. Lack understanding of the customers will cause an organization loss their customers and then would loss the company profit. This paper demonstrates the development of e-commerce system by focusing on the use of a Priori algorithm as supported feature in our e-commerce system. The feature is included to increase a good customer relationship management for the proposed system. It is hoped the proposed prototype would illustrate some practical ideas on how much advantages can be benefited from the e-commerce system and customer relationship management

IMC customer-based perception: strategic antecedents and consequences on post-purchase customer behaviour

Last decades Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC) have been mainly analysed from a managerial perspective, overlooking the customer opinion. Thus, this research studies IMC customer-based perception, its strategic antecedents and consequences on post-purchase customer behaviour (satisfaction, word-of-mouth recommendations, and repurchase intention), from a multi-country perspective. The structural equation modelling and multi-group analysis are based on the customers´ survey data in Belarus and Spain. The results suggest that technology orientation positively affects IMC, and, customer orientation does not. IMC positively affects customer satisfaction, which in turn positively impacts on WOM and repurchase intention. WOM does not influence on repurchase intention. IMC directly affects WOM and repurchase intention in Spain and does not in Belarus, which is the significant country difference

CUSTOMER LOYALTY - THE MAJOR GOAL OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

This paper presents the importance of customer relationship management (CRM) and customer loyalty for any organization that whishes to be successful and competitive in the market. A new emphasis in marketing and CRM is more and more widespread - creating customer relationships.In a competitive environment, the organizations have to focus their efforts towards continuous meeting both current and potential needs of all their customers. Many organizations have to consider how to enter a market and then build and protect its competitive position. Traditional marketing has focused on the final consumer seeking to promote brand values and to generate forced demand on the company's product market. The development of the concepts of segmentation, targeting and positioning signified the organizations' refocusing from the market approach as a whole, respectively the "mass market", to targeting and positioning strategies developed to suit the characteristics of the target segments chosen by the organization. The emergence and development of a distinct concept of customer relationship management and CRM software solutions design led to increasing focus on customer organization strategy. In addition to the strategy dedicated to a particular target segment, organizations have begun to design strategies and programs aimed at developing strategic relationships with specific strategic customers.The purpose of any customer relationship strategy should be customer acquisition and retention.Organizations should strive to develop CRM strategies to maintain and strengthen customer loyalty of the important customersmarketing, customer relationship management, customer orientation, customer acquisition, customer loyalty

A Tale of Two Cultures: Why Culture Trumps Core Values in Building Ethical Organizations

As research demonstrates that organizational culture is a primary influence of employee behavior and that leaders shape this behavior, this author explores the influence of the effects of organizational culture on ethical behavior by considering two separate, and very different, corporate case studies: Enron and Zappos

A case study of predicting banking customers behaviour by using data mining

Data Mining (DM) is a technique that examines information stored in large database or data warehouse and find the patterns or trends in the data that are not yet known or suspected. DM techniques have been applied to a variety of different domains including Customer Relationship Management CRM). In this research, a new Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) framework based on data mining is proposed. The proposed data mining framework in this study manages relationships between banking organizations and their customers. Two typical data mining techniques - Neural Network and Association Rules - are applied to predict the behavior of customers and to increase the decision-making processes for recalling valued customers in banking industries. The experiments on the real world dataset are conducted and the different metrics are used to evaluate the performances of the two data mining models. The results indicate that the Neural Network model achieves better accuracy but takes longer time to train the model

The Influence of a Hospitable Healthcare Environment on Patient Emotions and Behavioral Responses

A structural model is proposed and empirically examined that investigates the influence of a medical center’s environment on patient responses. A stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model, often used to frame hospitality service research, is adapted as the basis of the theory that elements included in a healthcare Servicescape will affect emotional responses of patients, which in turn influence their overall satisfaction with experience and likelihood to return, recommend to others, and willingness to pay higher out of pocket expenses behavioral intentions. Analyzed elements of the Servicescape include physical design, layout, atmospherics, and service delivery

Making space for experiences

Leisure and retail providers need to understand the elements of the visitor experience and the way in which they evaluate their satisfaction. This article suggests a holistic prism model of the interaction between the management and the visitor in a leisure space. This is applied to a netnographic study of visitors to a folk festival to illustrate the interconnectiveness of the different attributes causing dissatisfaction. It found that the physical and operational attributes were evaluated not through a checklist of individual features but as hindrances to the visitor's desire to make best use of the time. Visitors also evaluated the experience in the light of their own values and concerns, passing judgement on the values communicated by the management. At the heart of the experience was the enjoyment of choosing from an abundant offer and discovering something new. The main attraction is often only the pretext for enjoying the company of friends so places to meet before and chill-out afterwards are vital to the experience. The distinctiveness of the setting, the food and drink can become the sensory cues which give the event or location its uniqueness. The challenge to retail and leisure organisations is to design these elements of a memorable experience into their offerings

Competitive Positioning in International Logistics: Identifying a System of Attributes Through Neural Networks and Decision Trees

Firms involved in international logistics must develop a system of service attributes that give them a way to be profitable and to satisfy customers’ needs at the same time. How customers trade-off these various attributes in forming satisfaction with competing international logistics providers has not been explored well in the literature. This study explores the ocean freight shipping sector to identify the system of attributes that maximizes customers’ satisfaction. Data were collected from shipping managers in Singapore using personal interviews to identify the chief concerns in choosing and evaluating ocean freight services. The data were then examined using neural networks and decision trees, among other approaches to identify the system of attributes that is connected with customer satisfaction. The results illustrate the power of these methods in understanding how industrial customers with global operations process attributes to derive satisfaction. Implications are discussed