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Top1. Introduction
Obviously, there is a strong competition among organizations and fast changes in the business environment. In this way, customer retention has become the main interest of researchers and practitioners particularly in the domains of Marketing and Information Systems (IS). Also, Customer retention has been an important issue since the mid-1990s, but little research has been conducted into management processes that are associated with excellent customer retention performance (Ang & Buttle, 2006).
Additionally, the globalization of business has highlighted the need of Information Technology (IT) to understand the rapid growth customers’ demands, due to the global competition; defensive marketing is becoming more attractive and popular. Obviously, this trend is magnified by the rapid development of CRM systems and the adoption of the customer-centric orientation (Stefanou et al., 2003). In view of this, organizations from different fields of business are increasingly engaged in development customer retention process to strength their relations with their customers in order to develop a competitive advantage as a weapon against the strong competition.
In this new era, many organizations lost sight of it to grow and compete with domestic and global competitors. Thus, organizations try to achieve it from managing knowledge. Since the 1980s, researchers have been talking more and more about an era of focusing on customer retention (Sheth, 2002). In addition, the organization has been using a process to decrease the time to process customer requests, improve ongoing service, and better structure deals to meet customer retention (Nehari-Talet et al., 2010). Also, CRM is a strategy to identify and satisfy customer need and behavior; and doing so will result in a stronger relationship with them, the objective of CRM essentially is to enhance this cumulative effect and thus the loyalty of the customer (Chandra & Strickland, 2004). Therefore, customer retention has emerged as one of the most challenging issues in business because of the value expected from carrying out the customer retention process in organizations. Customer retention became an important business process because it touches the most important assets of all organizations that are the customer (Alryalat & Alhawari, 2008). In this new era, companies are focusing on managing customer relationship in order to efficiently maximize customer retention. Today, the tone of the conversation has changed from customer acquisition to retention. This requires a different mindset and a different and new method in business environment. So, most jobs are becoming ever more knowledge intensive and a majority of employees are moving to customer retention.
Our study is therefore distinctive in that, it addresses one of the important issues in Middle Eastern area because the use of IT is new for them. Therefore, this paper helps and provides guidance for the IT industry to show how an analytical process should be taken into account in developing countries to support to achieve customer retention in Jordanian Banks.
This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we review relevant literature; section three proposes the research model and hypotheses, section four is about the research methodology in which we discuss the design of the questionnaire, sample, data collection, hypotheses analysis and results. The last segment of this paper is our conclusion of the study.