Abstract
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has emerged as an offshoot to automation breakthrough as it ensured service-encapsulation by integrating people, process and technology and completely transformed the transaction-based marketing into a relationship-based format. Technology-driven service delivery mechanism has made a world of change in the service quality perception whereby new dimensions of perceived service quality were explored by the researchers. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore the link between automated service quality-customer satisfaction-customer retention in a CRM ecosystem with an insight into the probable moderating impact of relationship inertia and switching cost on the said link. The study was carried out on the State Bank of India involving certain specific branches in southern part of West Bengal, India. Multivariate statistical procedures were applied which included regression analysis and exploratory & confirmatory factor analysis followed by structural equation modeling to justify the factor constructs of the proposed model. The study revealed a positive link between automated service quality, customer satisfaction and retention with relationship intertia and perceived switching costs significantly influencing the link between the three major variables. Further-to-this the CRM performance level of SBI also seemed to make a positive impact on perceived automated service quality.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.