The effects of customer relationship management adoption on customer satisfaction and loyalty: An empirical study in telecommunication sector

Nowadays, organizations are striving to apply different marketing strategies and programs to increase their market share and to attract more customers, as well as satisfy them and make them loyal to their brand; this is due to massive competition in today's business market. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) recently gained great priority as a marketing strategy. Organizations gain knowledge about their customers through application of CRM. They transmit this knowledge to their offers to fulfill the needs of customers and satisfy them. In this way, customer retention is ensured and thereby prevents customers from switching to other brands in the market. This study aimed to examine the impact of customer relationship management applications on customer satisfaction and loyalty in the telecommunications sector of Burkina Faso. Six critical CRM elements have been examined in this study: service quality, trust, calculative commitment, complaint handling, use of information technologies and relational bonds. A survey was conducted on customers of Burkina Faso's three mobile phones operators in order to test the hypotheses of the research. The findings showed that service quality, trust, calculative commitment and relational bonds are significantly related to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Complaints handling has been found to have a positive influence on customer satisfaction but not on customer loyalty. In contrast to our expectations, there was no influence of use of information technologies on both customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Furthermore, the finding confirms the role of customer satisfaction as an important determinant of customer loyalty. Overall, findings of the study provide a striking demonstration of the importance of customer relationship management to enhance customer satisfaction and customer loyalty in Burkina Faso's mobile phone companies.