Banks are known to have stable and long lasting relations with their customers, which is why development of customer relations is a crucial strategic issue in banking. However, a basic problem in banking is that the customer base is heterogeneous, ranging from homogenous segments of customers with the same preferences to customers with individual demands for customized services. A key issue in banking is thus how bank managers view different strategies to develop their customer relations. This paper investigates how bank branch managers perceive the heterogeneity of their market and how the bank’s relationship strategy affect the development of customer relations. To this end, 135 branch bank managers answered a questionnaire, which was processed by LISREL. Results suggest that how bank managers perceive customer relationship development is determined by the heterogenous market and the bank’s relationship strategy. Contrary to our expectations, bank managers consider that more difficult relationship development leads to a more centralized locus of realized strategy. This suggests that banks relationship development need to focus more on customer orientation, and that realized strategies need to support this.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Uppsala University, Department of Business Studies in its series Working Papers with number
1998:2.
Length: 14 pages Date of creation: 1998 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhb:uufewp:9802
Contact details of provider: Postal: Department of Business Studies, Uppsala University, Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Web page: http://www.fek.uu.se/
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Sune Karlsson).
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: