Relationship marketing and its impact on customer loyalty in service industry

Abstract

The importance of developing and maintaining enduring relationships with customers of service businesses is generally accepted in the marketing literature. A key challenge for marketers, therefore, is to formulate and implement marketing programmes that will produce important relationship marketing outcomes. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of relationship marketing strategy on customer loyalty in the service industry. It is a theoretical paper which reviews different literature on some key constructs of relationship marketing that shape customer loyalty such as trust, commitment, communication, service quality and conflict handling. The review reveals that the aforementioned variables have a significant effect on customer loyalty. Thus, it is concluded that customer loyalty can be created, reinforced and retained by marketing plans aimed at building trust, demonstrating commitment to service quality and delivery, communicating with customers in a timely, reliable and proactive fashion, and handling conflict efficiently. Therefore, companies and strategists aiming to nurture loyal customers should pay close attention to issues of trust, commitment, communication and conflict handling among other things.