Relationship between customer relationship management and customer loyalty: An application with insurance agents

II ABSTRACT RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY: AN APPLICATION WITH INSURANCE AGENTS Caner CANBOLAT Master Thesis, Business Department Supervisor: Assistant Prof. Canan MADRAN July 2004, 124 pages Customer loyalty is an important concept from the early times of trade. In the early era, loyalty was constituted by maintaining individual relations with individual customers. The number of customers of an average company increased as time passes and mass selling became popular, which weakens the relations with individual customers. For the last few decades, products and services are standardized in production and distribution processes. Customer's chance to choose increased but loyalty levels decreased as a result of these developments. The differential advantage of companies, to have loyal customers, arouse from their ability to maintain strong relations with their customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) perspective is used to realize customer loyalty. Within this study customer relationship management, customer relationship management strategies, customer loyalty, factors of loyalty and obtaining customer loyalty with customer relationship management perspective has been examined and a field study related to these issues conducted. The field study was conducted with, agents of various insurance companies located in Adana. In this study the p urpose was to clarify relationship between customer relationship management applications and customer loyalty. The survey results have indicated that, there is a relationship between applying customer relationship management processes and obtaining customer loyalty. According to the results, firms who applied customer relationship management obtain high level of loyalty of their customers. Keywords: Customer Relationship Management, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Selection, Customer Acquisition, Customer Loyalty, Cross Selling