Impact of Customer Relationship Perceptions (CRP) on customer loyalty: with special reference to supermarket consumers in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Keeping and satisfying existing customers has been found as more profitable than attracting new customers. Hence, building and maintaining strong relationships with their customers has become a basic requirement for companies today, in order to stay ahead the competitors. Therefore, the emphasis put on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) by companies shows a clear increase in the recent past. Firms aim to build close relationships with customers to enhance customer relationship perceptions (CRPs) which would lead to customer loyalty (CL).However, literature shows that the majority of past researches have considered the impact of CRPs on either customer retention or customer share while there are only few researches that studied the relationship between CRPs and CL especially within the context of Sri Lanka. Therefore, in order to fill the knowledge gap, this research focuses on the relationship between CRPs and CL with special reference to supermarket consumers in Sri Lanka. The major objectives are to determine the level of CRPs of Sri Lankan supermarket consumers, to determine the level of CL of Sri Lankan supermarket consumers and to determine the impact of CRPs on CL of Sri Lankan supermarket consumers. This study is descriptive and correlational in nature. Primary data was gathered through self-administered questionnaires where the unit of analysis was consumers who possess a loyalty card of a supermarket chain. A Sample of 180supermarket consumers was selected for the survey basing on convenience and judgment under the non-probability sampling technique. The One- Sample T Test and Regression Analysis were performed to test the hypotheses. The results show that, there is a high level of CRPs among supermarket consumers in terms of affective commitment and satisfaction and there is a high level of CL towards supermarket consumers in terms of attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. Further, findings show that CRPs dimensions positively affect customer loyalty. R2 of 45.9 indicates that approximately 46% of the variance of CRPs is explained by this conceptual model. However, it is evident that there are other important variables that contribute to CRPs of the Sri Lankan supermarket consumers and those variables would collectively account to approximately 54 % of the variance of the CRPs. The implication of this research can be used to develop CRPs tactics in order to increase CL.