The role of attitudinal loyalty in the development of customer relationship management strategy within service firms

To facilitate the management of customer relationships, software manufacturers have developed customer relationship management (CRM) systems. These are enterprise-wide applications that can provide a single view of any customer's interactions with the company by tracking communications from both sides, recording purchases and thus developing an understanding of each customer's preferences. The need to generate behavioural loyalty has been identified as one of the major drivers for implementing CRM systems. There is relatively little research on attitudinal loyalty and CRM, however, with the bulk of the research conducted so far being focused on behavioural loyalty. The emphasis on behavioural loyalty has led to CRM being used to develop behavioural loyalty strategies. Generally speaking these strategies involve creating loyalty programmes, where incentives are offered to generate repeat purchase, or to sell more of the organisation's products and services to existing customers. The purpose of this research is to investigate the objectives and strategies of CRM in the finance industry and to compare these with the CRM objectives and strategies found in other service industries. The authors investigate to what degree the development of attitudinal loyalty is a factor in the creation of CRM strategy. This study is a qualitative study made up of 25 one-hour interviews with marketing and CRM managers. These 25 interviews consist of 11 interviews from the finance industry and 14 interviews from other industries as comparators. The results will be presented and contributions, limitations and suggestions for further research discussed.