The influence of relationship marketing by Telecommunication Vendors on Kenyan Telecommunication Service providers’ customer loyalty:

Abstract

Increasingly, marketing is moving from a focus on individual transactions and towards a focus on building value-laden relationships and partnerships with the customer. The goal is to deliver long-term value and relationship with existing customers and the measure of success is customer loyalty. There are many different relationship marketing tactics implemented for retaining customers. However, some of those tactics do not affect customer loyalty effectively and switching behaviors frequently occur among most of targeted customers. Therefore, this study is aimed to investigate the influence of relationship marketing tactics on relationship quality, which in turn influences customer loyalty, by focusing on Kenyan Telecommunication vendor sector. A conceptual framework is developed as a guideline to test the relationships between relationship marketing tactics (service quality, price perception, personalization and value offers), relationship quality constructs (customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer commitment) and finally on customer loyalty. A quantitative method with deductive approach is chosen in this research. In order to collect primary data, a questionnaire is designed and randomly sent out by email to Safaricom employees who represent the Telecom service provider’s view on the Telecom vendors’ relationship marketing strategy. SPSS for windows software is used to process the primary data. The findings show that Service Quality, Price Perception, Personalization and Value Offers have significant influence on customer loyalty indirectly via the customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer commitment albeit at different levels of correlation. Service quality as a relationship marketing tactic is found to have the greatest influence on customer loyalty followed by price perception, value offers and finally personalization of products and services by Telecom vendors.