Building High-Quality Customer Relationships in Family Firms: What’s New?

Abstract:     
Customer relationship is a key competitive of business, related to the ability of management to attract, maintain and enhance purchase relations (Berry, 1983). The need of a deeper understanding of the quality of these relations is an assumption for better answering customer needs and improve management knowledge. This involves a management’s comprehensive view of the whole system of beliefs, feelings, opinions, trust and emotions of customers that encompasses the aptitude of management to hold the right perception of different business aspects. This is not an automatic bent for managers customer oriented, probably because managers used to organise their customer interaction in centralized marketing functions to better accomplish service production for their customers (Eriksson & Mattson, 2002). In this way relationships with customers are relatively more emotional and behavioural, centred on such variables such as bonding, empathy, reciprocity or trust (Yau et al., 2000). For these reasons, the purpose of this work is to find a way able to evaluate the quality of customer relationship management in terms of the right management perceptions on customer beliefs. Through an empirically-based research method based on multiple customer respondents of a questionnaire on their perceptions this work tries to contribute to the largely theoretical literature on CRM. Results show that not always management perception finds confirmation in customer beliefs. This condition undermines the quality of customer relationship management. The implication of this research allows to better achieve a business customer orientation with the understanding in depth of customer leanings (Lengnick-Hall, 1996) and to increase and improve management tacit knowledge in relation to this specific aspects. As Stefanou et al. (2003) suggest, knowledge about key customers is essential for CRM as it can be used to develop a “learning relationship” with customers (Zahay and Griffin, 2004). Customer preferences and needs may be captured both directly or indirectly in an interactive feedback system that bases on the right management perception.

This research poses in a significance field of analysis that is still underdeveloped inside the stream of relationship researches (Bitner, 1995; Sheth & Parvatiar, 1995; Sheth & Sollner, 1999) where studies of management perception aspects are still little (Eriksson & Mattsson, 2002), in fact, few researches have focused on creating measurement scale and testing the CRM concepts empirically (Sin et al., 2005) especially regard on management perception.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 11

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management, Quality, Management, Perception

JEL Classification: M13

working papers series