Customer Loyalty
According to Heiner Evanschitzyky (2011) Gaining customer loyalty is an important
goal of marketing, and loyalty programs are intended to help in reaching it. Research on
loyalty programs suggests that customers differentiate between loyalty to a company
and loyalty to a loyalty program, yet little is known about the consequences of these two
types of loyalty. Therefore, our study intends to make two main contributions: (1)
improving our understanding of the constructs “program loyalty” and “company loyalty”,
(2) investigating the relative impact of the two types of loyalty on preference, intention,
and purchase behavior for the case of a multi-firm loyalty program. Results indicate that
company loyalty influences a customer’s choice to visit a particular provider and to
prefer it over competitors, but it is not a strong predictor of purchase behavior.
Conversely, program loyalty is a far more important driver of purchase behavior. This
implies that company loyalty primarily attracts customers to a particular provider and
program loyalty ensures that once inside the store, more money is spent.
Customer loyalty represents an essential issue both in the marketing literature
and in the marketing practice. The importance of the concept derives from the benefits
associated with retaining existing customers (McMullan, 2005). Research has shown
that brand loyalty is linked to business performance (Reichheld, 2003), being an
important predictor of long-term profitability (Salegna and Goodwin, 2005).
One essential contribution to the literature regarding brand loyalty was that of
Jacoby and Chesnut (1978) who classified the approaches regarding brand loyalty into
three categories: behavioral, psychological commitment, and composite. Their definition
sees brand loyalty as “the biased behavioral response expressed over time by some
decision-making unit with respect to one or more alternative brands out of a set of
brands and is a function of psychological processes” (Jacoby and Chesnut, 1978). This
definition, firstly proposed by Jacoby in 1971, is based on a composite approach of the
concept (Rundle-Thiele and Bennett, 2001), and it covers the most important aspects of
brand loyalty (Mellens et al, 1996), enjoying widespread support in the marketing
literature, and being the most often used in brand loyalty research (Rundle-Thiele and
Bennett, 2001; Mellens et al, 1996).
Customer Acquisition
The importance of customer acquisition varies according to the specific business
situation of an organization. This process is specifically concerned with issues like
acquiring customers at less cost, acquiring as many customers as possible, acquiring
customers who are indigenous and business oriented, acquiring customers who utilize
newer business channels etc. Customer acquisition techniques change with
technological changes. There is always a need to optimize and upgrade the traditional
ways of marketing channels available. Exploring new methods to entertain customers is
important to remain in competition and have high acquisition rate.
Customer Acquisition According to Kotler and Armstrong (2009), finding the
right customers that provides a profitable return can be defined as customer acquisition.
Customer acquisition is necessary for every companies that start creating a business,
expanding their business, products and services, and it is effective in situation where
the switching cost is relatively low and repeat purchases are rare. In acquiring
customers, it is essential for organization to choose the right customers to serve before
decide how they can best acquire them. This is particularly important as it is a fact that
organization will not be able to serve all customers in every way. Hence, organizations
nowadays decide to segment their customers and focus more on customers that they
can acquire, satisfy best and bring profitability (Jobber, 2010).
Customer Service
Customer service refers to the processes and actions making it easier for
customers to do business with a company (Kotler, 2000). Customer service can mean
different things to different people, according to their circumstances. For this reason, it is
important that the company is clear about what it is trying to achieve with ‘customer care’
programmes and their like. The company offers a product or service designed to meet
customer needs, together with all the intangible elements which go with it including
customer service. It is eminently sensible to make customers feel good about their
dealing with the company, said (John Leppard & Liz Molyneux, 1994).
Customer and Service According to Okoli (2007), customer is anyone who
approached the provider to satisfy his/her needs while service is the trade between
provider and customer that has the responsibility to create or destroy the organization. In
line with service is quality, which depend on the result of the customers' comparison
between expectations about service and perceived performance (Islam, 2011). Service is
different from product, and it is classified into three service dimensions, such as:
intangibility, simultaneous delivery and customer participation (Ojo, 2011). For Proompow
(2013), he defined service quality based on its important factors, where he stated that:
"The important factors of the service quality form the word SERVICE. That is 'S' stands
for satisfaction, 'E' stands for expectation, 'R' is readiness, 'V' is value, 'I' is Interest, 'C' is
courtesy and 'E' is efficiency.”
References:
https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Literature-Review-Related-Literature-On-Customer-
Service-PCB33YQ26R
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-011-0272-3
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1509/jmkr.45.1.048
