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Given such a turbulent business environment, building relationships with important stakeholders is crucial to a firm’s well-being. Both customers and employees are major concerns for firms that want to develop loyalty and competitive advantages. The challenge for long-run success in business is to continually increase the customer’s dependence on the company to provide products in an environment of mutual respect and perceived fairness. Creating mutually beneficial exchange relationship with customers mean that both parties work together to understand needs and develop trust.

The fundamental principle upon which relationship marketing is founded is that the greater the level of customer satisfaction with the relationship – not just the product or service – then the greater the likelihood that the customer will stay with us. The importance of retaining customers is that there is strong evidence that customer retention and

7. Consumer loyalty needs to be increased: - The main recommendation is to increase the good relationship with the consumer at all. The reason is that if there is a good relationship between the organisation and the consumer then the benefit will be to the organisation as good relationship sometimes helps to reduce expense on the other factors like huge expense that is done on the advertising of the brand of the organisation. In Asian markets, areas such as relationship building and a ‘benefit-the-country’ attitude are sometimes more important than investing enormous amounts on advertising (LaForet and Chen, 2012).

The aspects of business success that Jones (2012) chooses to study are that of customer retention and employee satisfaction. Being able to minimize the loss of customers correlates to improved financial

The video provided in this assignment eludes that businesses improve customer service, by handling customer service through call centers that are in house. The goal for any customer service representative is to be able to say yes to the customer on the other

Location is an important part of the internal influence as it is needed to be easily accessed. It is important for the business to be located in a place that is easy to access resources for production and to minimise distribution cost and/or close to the target market for sales such as consumers. In choosing a location the business should consider the 5 areas in locating. These include where it is visible, the cost of property, proximity to suppliers, proximity to customers and proximity to support

Nothing is more important than the satisfaction of the customer, without them, we would not be here.

Hallowell, R. (1996). The relationships of customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and profitability: an empirical study. International journal of service industry management, 7 (4), p. 27-42.

In the last 20 years, more and more emphasis has gone into investigating the core components of customer loyalty and seeking to single out the factors that cause customers to return. Studies have consistently demonstrated that clients who feel that they can trust the business or worker to care for them and to be honest will reward the business by their devotion even, occasionally, at cost to themselves. Han et al. (1993) rated trust as the most important characteristic in any business relationship, whilst Kumar et al. (1995) saw trust and commitment as being indistinguishable one from the other. When client learns to trust producer, commitment, almost inevitably followed.

Secondly, providing high quality customer service might be another essential factor in any customer loyalty strategy. The better a vendor treats their customers, the more likely the customers will return. As Cater and Cater (2009) state, an outstanding customer service could create a sustainable loyal customer

In order to generate customer loyalty, customer satisfaction is of utmost important. According to Oliver (1999), customer loyalty was defined as a buyer’s deeply committed and stick to a product, service, brand or organization consistently in the future regardless of new situations or competition that induce the switching process. Encouraging customers to come back again is the most critical part in every business. Repeated customers are the source of profits that allows business to grow and success. Some of the examples of customer loyalty are:

All the respondents regardless of position in the company argued that creating a loyal customer

In today’s competitive environment, maintaining customer relationships is a key to business success because customers are considered as important strategic resources of a business. However, all business markets contain many subgroups of customers that behave differently, that have different ambitions, and have different purchasing behaviours. Hence, each subgroup must be treated differently in order to build strong customer relationships. To compete with rival businesses, it is vital for a business to know enough about their customers and to know the wants and needs of the customers.

According to above literature review, this conceptual model build exhibits three variables including corporate brand image, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This research sets up hypotheses H1, H2, H3, confirm how these factors to influence and relate to each other. (Figure 1)

Over time, businesses have recognised that brand loyalty plays a key role in sustaining steady demand and sales flows over time (Aaker, 1991). In fact, Gralpois, (1998), as cited by Lodorfos, Mulvana and Temperley, (2006), labels brand loyalty as a fundamental asset of any business. Findings by Keiningham et al., (2006) have shown that it costs on average, five times more to replace a customer than it does to retain one. This underlines how businesses cannot afford to lose loyal customers and simply replace them with new customers. Subsequently, this has become a major reason why so much research is focused on achieving a better understanding of customers’ loyalty behaviour (Dick and Basu, 1994) (Liebermann, 1999).