UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ----------------------- PHAM THI PHUONG THAO DETERMINANTS OF CUSTOMER LOYALTY IN RETAIL BANKING: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN VIETNAM MASTER OF BUSINESS SUPERVISORS: DR. TRAN HA MINH QUAN Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Firstly, I offer my sincerest gratitude to all lecturers and staffs that supported and passionately conveyed useful knowledge to students of MBUS 2011 program. Secondly, I offer my special gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Tran Ha Minh Quan, who has guided me to fulfill my thesis with his patience and knowledge.
Thirdly, I would like to express appreciations to my friends who support me in discussing initial questionnaire and sending the final ones to survey target. Finally yet importantly, I would like to thank my family for their profound supporting, love and caring about me throughout my studies. Pham Thi Phuong Thao 2014, November Page | i LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ABSTRACT Loyal customers are considered as an important source of business profit and a free channel of advertisement. Although companies can boost their profit more than 85% by reducing customer defection rate by just 5%, the fact is that most of businesses lose from 15% to 20% of customers each year (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990).
This study aims to define some determinants of customer loyalty in Vietnam retail banking, including Brand Awareness, Convenience, Service Personnel, Satisfaction, Social Influence and Switching Costs. The survey was conducted in Ho Chi Minh City. The result showed that all six factors have a positive influence on the loyalty in Vietnam retail banking. In which, the influence from Brand Awareness, Satisfaction and Switching Costs was stronger than others.
The least impact was caused by Social Influence and Convenience. Keywords: Loyalty, Retail banking, Vietnam Page | ii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS. iii LIST OF TABLES.
iv LIST OF FIGURES .4 Research Scope and Research Contribution. 9 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .1 Definition of Customer Loyalty .2 Determinants of Customer Loyalty. 20 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .4 Data Collection Result. 29 Page | iii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.5 Data Analysis Method.
30 CHAPTER 4: DATA ANALYSIS .3 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA).1 EFA for Independent variables .2 EFA for Dependent variables .5 Regression Assumption Tests. 42 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION .3 Limitations and further research. 66 APPENDIX A - VIETNAM BACKGROUND. 66 APPENDIX B - IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW.
68 APPENDIX C - QUESTIONNAIRE IN ENGLISH VERSION. 71 APPENDIX D - QUESTIONNAIRE IN VIETNAMESE VERSION. 73 APPENDIX E – RESEARCH RESULTS. 75 LIST OF TABLES Table 1 – Distribution System of Vietnam banks 2013.
67 Table 2 – Distribution of Vietnam banking Infrastructure in 2013. 68 Table 3 - Construction of Measurement scale. 27 Page | iv LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Table 4 – Source of questionaire collection. 30 Table 5 – Demographic Information.
31 Table 6 – Reliability test result. 34 Table 7 – KMO and Bartlett's Test. 36 Table 8 – Rotated Component Matrixa. 37 Table 10 – KMO and Bartlett's Test.
39 Table 11 – Total Variance Explained. 39 Table 12 – Component Matrixa. 39 Table 13 – Correlations Matrix. 40 Table 14 – Model Summaryb.
44 Table 17 – Hypotheses results. 44 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1– Vietnam GDP per capita (USD). 66 Figure 2 – GNI per capita (USD). 66 Figure 3 – The rate of people (>15 years old) using debit card and credit card in 2011.
67 Figure 4 – Research Model. 21 Figure 5 – Research Process. 76 Page | v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction Customer Loyalty is always an attractive topic in marketing. Long-term customers are not only the vital source of profit but also a free channel of advertisement for business.
Cultivating loyal customers can lead to increased sales and customer share, lower costs, and higher prices (Zeithaml et al. Reichheld and Sasser (1990) reveal the surprising statistical number that companies can boost their profit more than 85% by reducing customer defection rate by just 5%. However, the fact is that most of businesses lose from 15% to 20% of customers each year (Reichheld and Sasser, 1990). This explains for the reason why there are a number of economists as well as marketers all over the world do research on customer loyalty.
In Vietnam, an emerging economy, marketing is still underdeveloped in comparison to the US, European and even some Asian countries (Khuat, 2012). Most of business, therefore, has not put a deep focus on loyalty and its important role to their business performance yet. Vietnam has experienced a period of economic crisis for recent years. Although the influence from the recession is not too serious as in some strong countries, most of business in Vietnam had to go bankruptcy and a large amount of bank debts could not be collected (The Financeplus, 2009; Le, 2014).
Some small banks had to merge to the stronger ones for survival. Many bank branches and transaction offices had to be closed or merged to others to cut off cost because of inefficient operation (The Vietinbank Network, 2014). The new trend for Vietnam banking therefore has opened. This is retail banking, which aims to individual customers with small value on each transaction but a large amount of deals and customers.
However, the development of Vietnamese retail banking performance has been still not corresponding with the potential market of over Page | 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ninety million residents (The VPBS Report, 2014). Many banks, especially state-own ones, still ignore loyal individual customers who have a long time in good relationship with the banks in order to set a new relationship with big enterprises instead (Nguyen, 2014). Indeliberately, banks do not create a good conditions for long-term customers to be loyal with them. Hence, this study focuses on some determinants influencing on the loyalty of individual customers in Vietnam banks.
This study could be a reference for banks to be more concerned on retail banking.2 Research background Vietnamese retail banking is evaluated as an emerging market that is still full of potential (The VPBS Report, 2014; Keith Pogson, as cited in Thanh Thanh Lan, 2014) but the level of customer loyalty is low. These features are demonstrated in the following analyses. According to The World Bank Data (2013), Vietnam population was about 90million people at the end of the year 2013. Fifty percent of this number was in the labor force.
However, only 20% of Vietnam population has banking accounts (The VPBS Report, 2014). The rest 80% creates a potential market for retail banking in Vietnam. In addition, the development of Vietnam economy in recent decades leads to a significant increase in the numbers of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita and the Gross National Income (GNI) per capita. The Figure 1 and 2 reveal that the average income and the standard of living of Vietnamese people rise over the years.
One of cultural feature of Asian countries is accumulating. Therefore, people have a tendency to allocate more budgets into saving items when they earn more money. As a result, the demand of using financial service increases. This contributes to create a potential market for retail banking in Vietnam.
Page | 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com However, the number of Vietnamese people using banking service still accounts for a low rate. Although there was a significant increase in market penetration rate of Vietnam banking, which was from 6% in 2006 to 21% in 2011; this rate was still modest in comparison to the number 55% held by the Pacific region (The VPBS Report, 2014). The VPBS Report 2014 shows that the rates of over-15-year-old people using debit card and credit card in Vietnam are lower than some developed Asian countries. As can be seen from the Figure 3 (Apendix A), Thailand is the country, which has the highest rate of over-15-year-old people using debit card (43%), followed by China (41%), Singapore (29%) and Philippines (23%), while that is only 15% in Vietnam.
The rate of over-15-year-old people using credit card in Vietnam is just 1%, holding the lowest rank among countries. One more reason for the high potentiality of Vietnam retail banking is the unequal distribution in banking system between urban area and rural area. The table 1 (see Apendix A) shows clearly that up to 30% branches and transation offices of State Owning Commercial Banks, Foreign Banks and over 50% that of Commercial Banks gather in only four big cities; namely Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Danang City and Can Tho City. While the remainder spread over 59 provinces and cities from the North to the South of Vietnam.
The Table 2 (see Apendix A) illustrates the distribution of infrastruture in Vietnam banking system in 2013. The figures show that Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have high density of transaction offices, which nearly 50 times higher than the average density of the whole country. Due to a great number of transaction offices in these two cities, the average number of customers served in each transaction office is 30% lower than the average of the whole Vietnam. Similarly, the number of customers using an ATM or POS is also approximately from 30% to 40% lower than the average number of the whole country.
This proves that service quality in the Page | 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com large cities is better than the average level in the whole country. There is aparently unequal development in retail banking service quality among regions, leading to opportunities to recruit the potentiality in far distance areas. Relating to the elastic level of customer loyalty in Vietnam banking, it is claimed that there are too many banks in Vietnam (around 49 banks) offering the same service for customer to select while there are only 3 to 4 large banks for options in Australia and Japan (Keith Pogson, Douglas J. Hamilton; according to Thanh Thanh Lan, 2014).
In addition, marketing, especially bank marketing, in Vietnam are still under developed compared with other neighbor countries; while banking belongs to intangible service. Therefore, customers are confused among so many bank brands that they even could not remember and recognize. The VPBS Report (2014) shows that Agribank, one of the four biggest banks in Vietnam, lost 1.91% its market share during the period of 2010 and 2013. Besides this, low service quality from personnel may lead to customer defection.
The lack of professional experience of staff in some banks, for instance, led to unexpected service quality (Le Chi, 2013; The Infonet, 2013). Interviewing some customers in well-known banks around Ho Chi Minh City about service quality from banking staffs reveals some inadequacies. Firstly, customers have to wait for a long time, even over one hour in rush days, to be served because the number of customers is overload for bank tellers. Secondly, bank staffs seem to have no time to introduce new promotional program or listen to customers for cross-selling.
Thirdly, due to working stress and crowded customers, bank tellers sometimes interact with customers in an unhappy attitude. Bank managers just focus on promulgating policies and launching marketing strategies but ignore to observing their staff in conducting process. Failure in solving customer dissatisfaction in the current era of information technology leads to a mass of loss for Page | 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.