A study of customer relationship in financial services industry

Abstract

Maintaining a long-term customer relationship is emphasized because the committed relationship is hard for competitors to understand, copy, or displace. Customer relationship management (CRM) plays an important role in maintaining a long-term relationship and generally refers to the management of the lifetime relationship with customers. Long-term relationship maintenance, which is associated with information sharing between providers and their customers, captures the essence of CRM. The increasing emphasis of customer relationship management leads to the concern of determining the relationship quality among parties. Therefore, relationship quality model is developed in this study. This study aims to fill in several research gaps. They are: (1) the importance of cause-effect relationship quality model in financial services industry; (2) the relation between information sharing and relationship quality; and (3) the linkage among relationship quality, anticipation of future interaction and willingness to refer. This study has the following objectives: (1) to assess the impact of information sharing on relationship quality; (2) to investigate the mediating effect of relationship quality between information sharing and long-term relationship consequences (anticipation of future interaction and willingness to refer); (3) to determine the relationship between anticipation of future interaction and willingness to refer; and (4) to provide recommendations to practitioners in implementing the customer relationship management via information sharing with the aim to enhance the relationship quality and eventually to increase anticipation of future interaction and willingness to refer. The proposed model, relationship quality model, is developed. Information sharing is hypothesized as the antecedent of relationship quality; and anticipation of future interaction and willingness to refer are hypothesized as the consequences of relationship quality. Two-step modeling procedures of confirmatory factor analysis and structural model evaluation are employed in analyzing the results. The findings confirm that the proposed structural model, the relationship quality model, is well fitted with satisfactory goodness-of-fit index for determining the relationships among information sharing, relationship quality, anticipation of future interaction and willingness to refer. The results show that information sharing is positively and significantly correlated to the relationship quality. Consequently, the construct of relationship quality is also positively correlated to the anticipation of future interaction and willingness to refer. Anticipation of future interaction is statically positively correlated to the willingness to refer. Both theoretical and managerial implications will be discussed.