UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Vu Thanh Hoan KEY ANTECEDENTS OF CUSTOMER LOYALTY: A STUDY OF SMALL CHARTERED COMMERCIAL BANKS MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ Vu Thanh Hoan KEY ANTECEDENTS OF CUSTOMER LOYALTY: A STUDY OF SMALL CHARTERED COMMERCIAL BANKS ID: 22110021 MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) SUPERVISOR: DR. CAO HAO THI Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Cao Hao Thi for the valuable advice, critical comments and encouragement he gave me. I would like to express my gratitude to my ISB class friends for SPSS directions.
Your encouragement, excellent guidance, and support have greatly contributed to this thesis. Finally, I would like to thank all of the respondents without whom, this research would have been impossible. Ho Chi Minh City, March 01, 2014 Vu Thanh Hoan LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT It is costly to attract new customers so that the managers always try to find ways to retain their current customers and concentrate on different factors which enhances the customer loyalty among the customers of the organizations. This research attempts to find the factors of customer loyalty and their relationships with banking industry in one of the developing countries i.
Vietnam, where the large part of banking industry are small chartered commercial banks. In order to do this, a questionnaire is designed and validated, then based on the data which were gained from the 150 respondents' answers to the designed questionnaire, the analysis is done and the results and the relations among the factors are explained. Customer’s Perceived Quality, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Trust, Switching Cost and Customer Commitment are the factors which influence the Loyalty of the customers. These factors also influence each other as well.
The relationships of different factors with each other are also studied and the SPSS software is used to analyze the data gathered from the respondents. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction .4 Chapter 2 Literature Review .2 Customer's perceived quality .7 Research model and Hypothesis. 18 Chapter 3 Research Methodology. 22 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.5 Data analysis methods .2 Exploratory Factor Analysis .3 Multiple regression analysis.
28 Chapter 4 Data Analysis and results .2 Exploratory Factor Analysis .1 Testing customer satisfaction sub-model. 34 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.2 Testing customer commitment sub-model .3 Testing customer loyalty sub-model. 35 Chapter 5 Conclusions and Implications. 52 Appendix 2: Results of Exploratory factor analysis.
58 Appendix 3: Simple linear regression results (S). 60 Appendix 4: Multiple linear regression results (CMT). 62 Appendix 5: Multiple linear regression results (CL). 64 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLE Table 3.1: Scale of perceived quality .2: Scale of customer trust .3: Scale of switching cost .4: Scale of customer satisfaction .5: Scale of customer commitment .6: Scale of customer loyalty .7: Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients .1: General information about respondents .3: Rotated component matrix.
31 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF FIGURE Figure 2.1: Customer satisfaction sub-model .2: Customer commitment sub-model .3: Customer loyalty sub-model .4: Multiple regression results. 37 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION This chapter introduces the background of Vietnamese banking industry as well as the status of customer loyalty. The research objectives are proposed in this chapter. Base on the objectives, research scope is proposed and thesis structure is presented.1 Background Loyalty to a bank can be thought of as continuing patronage over time.
The degree of loyalty can be gauged by tracking customer accounts over defined time periods and noting the degree of continuity in patronage (Yi and Jeon, 2003). During the past decade, the financial service sector has undergone drastic changes, resulting in a market place which is characterized by intense competition, little growth in primary demand and increased deregulation (Bloemer, Ruyter and Peeters, 1998). In the new market place, the occurrence of committed and often inherited relationships between a customer and his or her bank is becoming increasingly scarce (Li-Ting Huang et al, 2007). Several strategies have been attempted to retain customers.
In order to increase customer loyalty, many banks have introduced innovative products and services (Alam and Khokhar, 2006). However, as such innovations are frequently followed by similar change; it has been argued that a more viable approach for banks is to focus on less tangible and less LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 2 easy-to-imitate determinants of customer loyalty such as customer evaluative judgments like service quality and satisfaction (Worcester, 1997; Yavas and Shemwell, 1996). Banking has traditionally operated in a relatively stable environment for decades. However, today the industry is facing a dramatically aggressive competition in a new deregulated environment.
The KPMG (2014) reported that the banking industry in Vietnam has 33 commercial banks and they can be divided 33 banks into four group base on the chartered capital. The first group includes four state owned banks with the capital over 20,000 billion dong. The second group includes 11 commercial banks have the capital from 5,000 billion dong to 20,000 billion dong. The third group has 7 commercial banks with the capital ranging from 3,500 billion dong to under 5,000 billion dong.
Finally, the forth group comprises 11 commercial banks with the capital under 3,500 billion dong. The real estate industry got stuck recently which further increases the competition and complexity among the banks in the retail market. The small chartered commercial banks are the group three and four, where the limitation in capital made them traditionally become specialty in the retail market.2 Research Problems As every industry has the intense competition, the challenge in reserving the loyalty among customers is put in the first priority. The sustainable relationship is the crucial for the benefits of the business.
The most important reasons are dictated by Reis, Pena and Lopes (2005). Firstly, loyal customers are often willing to pay premium prices for a supplier they know and trust. Secondly, the cost of acquiring new LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 customers can be substantial. A higher customer retention rate implies that fewer customers need to be acquired and these can be acquired more cheaply.
Thirdly, loyal customers often refer new customers to the supplier at virtually no cost. And finally, established customers tend to buy more. Marketing experts always say that the number of customer that the company loses becomes the number that the competitor gains. According to Kotler et al (1996), it takes the company five times as much money and effort to gain a new customer as to reserve an existing one.
However, in today’s highly competitive global market, it takes as much energy and efforts to keep customer as to find a new one. Therefore, loyalty is recently seen as the difficulty that every company must learn to do all its best. Individuals and small and medium enterprises are the traditional of the small chartered banks, but the real estate industry got a crunch, therefore all the banking industry is focus on the retail market. The limitation in capital of commercial affects their ability in the risk taking, leading to the low ratio of loan over the mortgage value and the loan giving to one customer.
Small chartered capital commercial banks also have less tangible facilities compared to the group one and two. However, increasing the capital is not the answer to the low competitiveness in this situation due to some reasons. Firstly, the stock market is not a lucrative investing channel anymore. The bank stock is not getting the attention like before.
Secondly, the Government issues the regulations made the state owned corporation to not invest in other industry especial in financial and banking. And last but not least, the banking LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 4 industry is currently got the surplus of the deposit, whereas the loaning is difficult and risky. Therefore, increasing the capital is not the brilliant measure in this situation. The best way is to raising the customer loyalty measures to get the benefits and compete with other commercial banks with higher capital.3 Research Objectives The overall objective is to analyze the factors which influence the customer loyalty in the banking industry of Vietnam.
The research objectives are as follows: - To analyze the influence of satisfaction, commitment and switching cost on customer loyalty. - To analyze the influence of perceived quality on satisfaction. - To analyze the influence of satisfaction and trust on commitment.4 Research Scope: This study focuses on enterprise customers of small chartered commercial banks in Ho Chi Minh City, who have more frequently banking activities and more continuous account transaction than the individual customers. Therefore, this sample cannot represent for Vietnam nationwide.5 Thesis Structure: The thesis is organized as follows: - Chapter 1 introduced the background of the study, research problems, research objectives, and research scope.
- Chapter 2 presents the literature review and conceptual foundation. - Chapter 3 presents the methodology and methods of the study LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 5 - Chapter 4 reports the analysis of data and findings of the study. - Chapter 5 discusses the recommendations of the study and suggestions for future research are made. LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 6 CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter is an overview of customer loyalty and its antecedents which have been conducted by previous researchers.
Based on these studies, a conceptual model is proposed. Is customer loyalty is the most – mentioned subject in the business management meeting and is it the success secret of all the industries in general and banking sector in particular? Bain & Company (2001) show the research result about the relation between business profit and customer loyalty. They find that the company pays more attention on building the customer loyalty is gaining great profit. Their research points that five percent rising in the customer retention increasing almost thirty percents in profits.
Finding a new customer always costs the company more financial expenses and efforts than retaining an existing customer. Especially, the existing customers have the high ability to buy again and again the products and services and the scale of buying is increasing over the time. These research result push the managers try to find innovative to retain the existing customer and encourage the loyal customers buying more (Rigby et al, 2003). Customer loyalty is the decision of the customer to buy repeatedly the products and the services of the same brand over a long period of time.
The customer becomes LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 7 loyalty to one brand name just when they have the sufficient commitment and trust to a particular company. Loyalty in banking industry requires strong satisfactions from the customer to the banks for a long time. Therefore, when the customer becomes loyal to one bank, it will keep buying the services from this bank. Even the services might dissatisfy them from time to time, they have the trust the services will return balanced in the long run.
The customers have the adequate knowledge about the products and services that made them feel satisfied. This satisfactions showed by the intention of customers to repurchasing, the usage of the product and recommend about the products to other buyers (Oliver, 1999). Lin and Wang (2006) made the relevant researches to find that satisfaction is the reliable predictor of the repurchasing behavior.