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With the innovation in technology bringing numerous opportunities to the banking industry, as example OCBC Malaysia decided to take advantage of technology to carve new value-added services for their customers with the implementation of customer relationship management initiative (Yeoh, 2006). The drastic changes in their environment have forced financial institutions to revise their marketing strategies and to stress long-lasting relationships with customers (Perrien et al., 1992).
According to Wang (2004) there are two types of benefits to be captured by a company for establishing and maintaining customer relationship; tangible benefits and intangible benefits. Tangibly, customer will figure out a positive relationship length, relationship depth and breadth behaviors as a result of a good management of customer relationship by the firm. Intangibly, customer will figure out a positive relationship quality behavior as one of the benefits of firm customer relationship activities. Therefore, the operational definition of CRM performance in this study is “the intention of customers to figure out their positive relationship length, depth, and breadth behavior and a positive relationship quality behavior along their contacts with the firms”. In other way behavior-based CRM performance means “the tangible and intangible benefit arises from the activities of maintaining and establishing customer relationship by a firm such as relationship length, relationship depth and breadth and relationship quality”.
Many literatures have discussed the importance of maintaining relationship as strategies to make the customers return. Maintaining a long relationship with the customers will make them feel more confident and increase their sense of belonging towards the service providers. When a company is committed to their relationship, there is a tendency for the company to listen to customer complaints and dissatisfaction regarding the services offered. By maintaining a long relationship with the customers, the service providers will also gain many of benefits. The service providers can also deliver the most current information about their products or services and at the same time they can influence customers to make cross selling. An electronic banking service is the critical service that needs a higher sense of confident, security and privacy along the process of receiving the services. Therefore, it is a necessity for the banks especially toward electronic banking service to equip the service with the abovementioned characteristics so that customer will have more confident in them.
Since there are so many other factors that might influence CRM performance such as customer value (Jenson, 2001; Day, 1994; Slater, 1997; Wang et al., 2004), customer equity and customer asset (Rust et al., 2000; Blattberg et al., 2001), customer focus, companywide, cross functional and business process (Chen & Popovich, 2003), it would be useful and practical if we investigate the consequences of customer relationship management performance. Since the context of this study is electronic banking services, it is appropriate to propose a variety of technology factors such as online security, online privacy, ease of use, usefulness and other value factors such as customer value. Previous research confirm the importance of customer value factors as the antecedents for customer relationship management performance in security industry (Wang et al., 2004)