Increasing customer loyalty and customer intimacy by improving the behavior of employees

Abstract

Purpose One of the most important characteristics of high-performance organizations is that these organizations always aim at servicing their customers as best as possible. In practice, this means that the employees of these organizations have to behave toward customers in such a way that these customers are not only fully satisfied but also become loyal to the organization. The purpose of this paper is to look at the concrete behaviors that are needed to create this customer loyalty. Design/methodology/approach From a literature review the items that potentially are of influence on creating customer loyalty and customer intimacy were identified, based on a previous validated questionnaire while adding additional items. These items were subsequently validated in practice with a questionnaire distributed among people who are in daily life regular customers of organizations. Findings The research results show that there are eight behavioral factors of importance to create customer loyalty and customer intimacy: first, service quality delivered by employees; second, capability of employees to deliver high quality; third, empathy of employees toward customers’ wishes and needs; fourth, understanding of employees of customers’ needs; fifth, responsiveness of employees toward the needs of customers; sixth, courtesy of employees toward customers; seventh, service manner of employees; and finally, trust customers place in employees. Research limitations/implications The implication of this research is that, now that the behavioral factors are known, an organization can make sure its employees focus on displaying these behaviors toward customers consistently over time, in order to make sure customers will experience the organization as a high-performance organization and will feel loyalty toward the organization. Originality/value The research described in this paper adds to the literature in the sense that it encompasses previous research into once item list and specifically looks at behaviors that create excellent service and thereby customer loyalty and customer intimacy, both concepts that go beyond the much researched topic of customer satisfaction.

A study on improving employees’ behaviour towards increasing students’ loyalty: the mediating role of need understanding, service quality, and intimacy among students in Kenya

“…They argue that for organizations to achieve their objectives, employees have to understand the importance of the customer to the organization since the organization ceases to exist if there are no customers. They identified behavioural factors such as (service quality (SQLTY), need understanding (NEEDUND), as some of the factors if display by employees towards customers could possibly lead to intimacy (INTIMACY) and subsequently lead to customer loyalty (for more commentary on this, see de Waal et al, 2016). In this study, the customer (herein refer to student) loyalty will be used and for more similar work (see, Helgesen & Nesset, 2007).…”

“…Past researchers have identified intimacy as playing an important role and a dual one between the customer and the organization relationship building process (Treacy & Wiersma,1993). As cited in de Waal et al (2016), customer intimacy is defined as "making customers feel good whenever they make contact with your company" (Ballou, 2006, p. 5, cited in IBM Global Services, 2006 or "tailoring and shaping products and services to fit the increasingly specific definition of the customer" (Bügel, 2010, p. 65). Empirically, past researchers ( for more details see, Fleming et al, 2005;Lloyd & Luk, 2011;Pitta et al, 2006, Lau, 2000Xu & Van der Heijden, 2005;Yim et al, 2008) observed that having a good interaction with customers and employees of an organisation impact on customer intimacy.…”

“…There has been a call from researchers like Ruiz et al (2016) for researchers to introduce fairly newly constructs in testing loyalty since constructs like trust and satisfaction have extensively been researched. Quite recently, researchers like de Waal et al (2016) heed to this call by studying the behaviours of employees that predict intimacy which, in turns, leads to customer loyalty. They argue that for organizations to achieve their objectives, employees have to understand the importance of the customer to the organization since the organization ceases to exist if there are no customers.…”

“…What is missing in the customer loyalty research in the educational sector is the kind of behavioural attitude employees of educational institutions, especially universities which the study is focused, should demonstrate towards their students for them to be loyal. There are several studies on customer loyalty (for more details, see Al-Awadi, 2002;Chang et al, 2009;Kuo & Ye, 2009 ;Sembiring, 2013;Kheiry et al, 2012;de Waal et al, 2016;Ruiz, et al, 2016 ), we are yet to have a universal definition on the concept. However, for the purpose of this study, we adopted the definition of Reichheld (2003).…”

“…Also, readers should keep in mind that in this study, student loyalty means the loyalty of the students during their course of study and after graduation from the university. Building on the recommendations of de Waal et al (2016), this study filled the gap by quantitatively testing these behavioural factors mentioned earlier by examining the behavioural factors of university staff (need understanding (NEEDUND) and service quality (SQLTY) on students' intimacy (INTIMACY) and student loyalty (STLOY). The study further examined direct and indirect mediation between NEEDUND, SQLTY, STINTM, and STLOY.…”