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Top1. Introduction
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has long been a topic of high interest in both academia and practice, and it has been found to be beneficial to the firm (Baksi, 2014; Long, Khalafinezhad, Ismail, & Rasid, 2013). CRM is primarily based on the concepts of Relationship Marketing (RM), a growing area of present day marketing (Sheth & Parvatiyar, 2000). The system of maintaining a sustainable relationship with clients is termed as CRM which helps organizations to enhance in understanding the customer, maintain them through higher consumer experience, attract new customers, expand profitably and furthermore, lessening customer management costs. (Angamuthu, 2015). In recent decades, to compete and sustain in the market, CRM strategy has been considered as a major marketing weapon (Rajesh & Manivannan, 2013). The success of better CRM strategy application will be of excellent gain to the organizations, adopting it, as such businesses can obtain the advantage of growing sales through better market segmentation, tailoring products and services, acquiring superior class products, gaining entry to information and employee satisfaction, and furthermore, making sure long-lasting customer-retention and loyalty (Almotairi, 2009; Özgener & İraz, 2006; Stockdale, 2007; Verma & Chaudhuri, 2009).
Customer satisfaction is one of the major aspects of marketing which cannot be overlooked. Some authors like, Rahim, Ignatius, and Adeoti (2012) termed customer satisfaction as the heart of marketing. It’s an inevitable part of overall customer satisfaction that exposes supplier’s behavior in the lenses of the customer. For ensuring an effective customer satisfaction agenda, CRM has a great role to play. Customer satisfaction is the main goal of all marketing activities and initiatives (Alananzeh, Jawabreh, Al Mahmoud, & Hamada, 2018). The ability of an organization to meet its customer's preferences and fulfill their needs without efficient customer services which are delivering quality service to meet their expectations (Vallen & Vallen, 2009). A wide range of researchers in different fields relentlessly investigating the impact of CRM on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. In recent decades, the tourism sector is developing worldwide. The researchers in tourism sectors have become passionate regarding the integration of CRM, customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention (Gursoy, McCleary, & Lepsito, 2007). Satisfied customers or tourists are those whose desired expectations are meet at a certain point and thus satisfied tourist gives favorable word of mouth which is an important factor especially in tourism industry and destination like Saint Martin island because, with excellent tourist satisfaction, tourists are more likely to share their experiences to their friends, relatives, colleagues which will ultimately give positive image. In the previous studies, researchers showed a significant relationship among CRM, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customer retention. On that base, this study is an attempt to find out whether there is any relationship exist between CRM and customer satisfaction in order to raise tourist attraction in Saint Martin Island? What kind of relationship exists between CRM and customer retention in the current study? Whether CRM quality has an impact on customer loyalty or not.
The term loyalty is defined from a researcher's point of view as a state where customers becoming satisfied by using product and services the aftermath of the satisfaction is that, the customer will come back to the same brand to use same product or services from the same organization, make references through different word of mouth techniques, and encourage others to use the same (Bowen & Shoemaker, 1998). It is the result of consistently positive emotional experience, physical attribute-based satisfaction and perceived value of an experience, which includes the product or services. Therefore, loyalty is a commitment of current customers with respect to a particular store, brand, and service provider, when there are other alternatives that the current customer can choose (Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003). Now the question may catch our attention like, what kind of relationship exists between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in this study purpose?