Research Of Customer Equity Under The Context Of Customer-Enterprise Dynamic Relationships

Domestic and international scholars have done many researches on Customer Equity and its divers. From the perspective of Relationship Marketing, this research is conducted to deeply explore the Customer Equity under the context of Customer-Enterprise dynamic interactions. In order to dedicate to supplement and deepen the current researches, this research is also hoping to provide advices to the developing of customer relationships for the Chinese enterprises which are facing the transformation of economic environment and increasingly intensive competition.Up to now, the prior researches on Customer Equity are relatively lacking of an integrated approach to reveal the mechanism about how to form the Customer Equity as well as offer help to the enterprises for the management execution. This research is based on the Customer Relationships and Customer Equity management in Chinese banking industry as an example, trying to establish a relationship-oriented Customer Equity management model. Our research thinks a relationship-oriented Customer Equity management capabilities will be the future core competitiveness of B2C service businesses such as banks.Only those enterprises, which can build up long-term stable relationships with their customers, will be able to steadily win market share and obtain financial return. Therefore, our research established a customer equity management model based on relationship quality as the core foundation. And, we constructed theory and formed the guidance for execution to help the enterprises with aspects about how to drive customer equity from the relationship perspective, and make efforts on what drivers to improve the relationship quality between the enterprises and customers.In terms of researching customer relationship and customer equity, the dynamic of relationship is an important character, and the difficulty of obtaining data is causing a challenging part of research. This research is using the theory of customer segmentation and customer life-cycle management to segment customers by relational type and transactional type. Meanwhile, together with the traits of banking industry, we segment the relationship between the enterprises and customers by3 stages as acquisition/promotion stage, maturity stage, and declining stage. Our research did exploration on the relationship between relationship quality and customer equity for the two types of customers respectively. Also, we did analysis on the changes of situation for the two types of customer during different stages of customer life cycle.In addition, this research thinks the segmentation of customer types is a dynamic process. In this paper, we segment the customers by relational type and transactional type because of the needs for doing the research. However, the traits of transactional type of customers are not unchanged all the time. They would adjust their behaviors according to the changes of banks’business and marketing strategy. Hence, viewing from the management strategy, this research thinks the enterprises need to conduct timely measurement on the relationship quality with their customers, and also take proactive approach to manage the changes of the customers and make efforts to transform the transactional type of customers to the relational type of customers.During the beginning period of this research, we did survey on17banking customers to understand their business with the banks as well as their relationship and interactions with the banks. At the same time, the author did individual interviews with the business management and client managers from five banks, including one foreign invested bank and four Chinese banks. Based on the large volume of first-hand data collected from the surveys, and combined with the related measurement scales done by currently available researches, we designed the questionnaire of this research.The formal questionnaire survey of this research was conducted in banking branch networks in both Beijing and Tianjin. The customers filled in the questionnaire while they were waiting for banking services or just finished the transactions. The author also used the internet web site to collect the questionnaire input data. Totally, we issued680questionnaires, and collected back632questionnaires with553effective questionnaires.Finally, the whole data was analyzed through AMOS7.0and SPSS13.0software, and the reliability and validity of the scale were inspected and validated. This study used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to construct the structural equation tor customer equity drivers, relationship quality and customer equity, which was further verified by the regression analysis and independent sample T test.Through the research, this paper came out the following conclusions:For relational customers, there is a significantly positive relationship between customer satisfaction and customer equity increase.For relational customers, there is a significantly positive relationship between customer trust and customer equity increase.For relational customers, there is a significantly positive relationship between customer commitment and customer equity increase.For transactional customers, there is a significantly positive relationship between customer satisfaction and customer equity increase.For transactional customers, there is no significantly positive relationship between customer trust and customer equity increase.For transactional customers, there is no significantly positive relationship between customer commitment and customer equity increase.Under the perspective of relationship marketing, customer equity have five drivers, which are professional expertise, service interaction, cooperative intentions, brand recognition and product difference. These driving factors indirectly influence the value increasing of customer equity through relationship quality.For relational customers, the relationship between relationship quality and customer equity increase shows an inverted U-shaped pattern. During the customer acquisition period, the effect influenced by relationship quality to customer equity increase is positive. Moving into the maturity period, the effect influenced by relationship quality to customer equity is still positive while the degree is reduced. Then in customer declining period, the effect influenced by relationship quality to customer equity increase is negative.For transactional customers, the relationship quality has a negative effect on customer equity increase.In this article, from a relationship marketing perspective, our above conclusion has formed the systematic framework of customer equity research. In the context of the dynamic customer-enterprise relationship, the thorough analysis is conducted on the relationship between relationship quality and customer equity. The research results have enabled the enterprises to grasp a direct guidance of customer relationship management practices.