Relationship marketing and customer loyalty: Do customer satisfaction and customer trust really serve as intervening variables?

Abstract

To contend the traditional transaction marketing, which focuses on the completion of the transaction and the pursuit of maximizing profits for each transaction, the relationship marketing in the banking sector, on the other hand, offers the establishment of strong relationships and stable partnerships between bank and its customer in order to maximize the pursuit of the interests of all aspects of the relationship. This paper examined the nature of linkages between relationship marketing and customer loyalty by using customer satisfaction and customer trust as the intervening variables. It investigated the customer perception on customer satisfaction's characteristics and confidence in exchange partner's reliability and integrity as the mediating factors to build their trust on the banking services. The researchers employed 150 respondents of private banking as the sample and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to analysis the relationship. The results revealed that the relationship marketing tactics affected customer loyalty significantly through customer trust and customer satisfaction. It explicitly demonstrates that the banks have undertaken an organization-wide strategy to manage and nurture their interaction with clients and sales prospects as the base for their customer loyalty. © 2013 International Business Information Management Association.