Many researchers preserve that one of the key goals of marketing is to build and sustain strong customer relationships (Bagozzi 1995; DeWulf, Odekerken - Schröder, and Iacobucci 2001). Also, the relationship marketing investment enhances both customer trust and commitment and in turn these relational mediators influence customer behaviors, leading to superior seller performance (Moorman, Zaltman, and Deshpandé, 1992; Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Sirdeshmukh, Singh and Sabol, 2002).
In my opinion, I totally agree the above statement, I think customer satisfaction or not was not mainly differentiated by price and other personal variables, but is the customers perception of service quality, the appropriation between the service quality and the external communication and the situational variable. If the organization has a high commitment to the human resources policies, thus will help the organization to move forward, increase their level of customer service and can benefit to all stakeholder. So as to increase customer commitment, we have to start with organization commitment to their employees; it is because employee is the one who serve the customer, especially the front line staff.
On the other hand, There has one studies show that employees’ commitment to the organization is strongly related to job performance and to behavioral outcomes, such as turnover and absenteeism (Riketa, 2002). Taking into consideration about the benefits for the individuals and the organizations, mangers can take action to strengthen employees’ affective commitment. In order to be effective, these promotional efforts should be based on a fine-tuned understanding of the determinants of organizational commitment and the contingent factors (Rousseau, Vincent, and Caroline Aubé. 2010). If the employees can have more commitment to the company, thus their job performance will be better, than the organization commitment to the customer can strengthen by giving them more value added service, also can reduce the cost for the company to hire new staff.
How commitment may be measured
In today’s competitive environment, ensuring and measuring customer satisfaction goes beyond delivering customer service, it is not only an orientation, it is an organization commitment to create a competitive advantage.
From the journal by James and Heish(2003), they adpted items from the scales used by Morgan and Hunt fl994J, Garbarino and Johnson (1999) and Pritchard, Havilz and Howard (1999) for the commitment construct. The three items that they used to measure commitment were: I am a loyal patron of this company, I plan to maintain a long-term relationship with this company and a reverse scored item of I have the intention to switch to another company. All measures employed seven-point scales ranging from 1 (extremely disagree) to 7 (extremely agree). From my research, these method are widely use in many organization and journal.
According to Rosenbaum, ct al. (2006), they also distribute questionnaire to their customer in order to measure the commitment. As to get more adequate answer from the customer, the questionnaire should be easy to understand and administer, also we have to always keep the question short, concise and easy to understand.
Out of the above method, nowadays, there are many new methods to measure customer commitment, for example, mysteries shopping, by this, the mystery shoppers can records actual behavior, monitors the information employees provide to customer. Also, they will know the satisfaction level of the customer. Besides, customer satisfaction surveys are also use to measure the degree to which customers are satisfied, whether their needs are met or not.
Conclusion
Based on the views and research done by numerous researchers and academicians, it can be concluded that customer’s commitment is really important for an organization to move forward and success. Although customer’s commitment does not guarantee that customer will repurchase, but it plays a very important part in ensuring customer loyalty and retention.
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