Exploring bank employees’ perception of customer loyalty

Abstract

Several researches on loyalty have focused on its perception among customers without considering the role of contact employees in its reinforcement. The purpose of this paper is to explore the perception of bank employees in Morocco on the customer satisfaction and loyalty. These factors are mainly related to commitment, trust and satisfaction. It also examines two dimensions of loyalty, namely attitudinal loyalty and behavioral loyalty. In order to be able to explore all the factors likely to impact customer loyalty, we conducted expert interviews with nine contact employees in Moroccan banks. The speeches transcribed following the semi-structured interviews were processed using QSR Nvivo 12 software. The objective was to find other components of relational orientation not yet cited in the literature using node coding. The interviews showed that most employees in the banks interviewed are aware of the importance and magnitude of the change in their relationship with customers. Beyond commitment, trust and satisfaction, new dimensions are mentioned, particularly interpersonal relationships, proximity and communication. This study contributes to the enrichment of the literature on relational orientation and the study of loyalty and proposes a synthesis model describing a simplified representation of the causal relationships between those components and loyalty.

Keywords:  trust, commitment, loyalty, bank employee, qualitative research, expert interview.

JEL Classification : M31

Paper type: Empirical research.