TASLY Medical Marketing Group, Customer Retention Strategy

Two means are usually taken by enterprises to gain profits and to win competitive advantage. One approach is to attract new customers, and the other way is to retain current customers. The former one is the traditional marketing way, which is transaction-oriented and results in a volatile market with high rate of customer-churn. The latter one is the modern marketing concept, which is customer focused and relation-oriented, resulting in accumulated and long-term benefits. For the above reason, customer retention is of particular importance for enterprises.Now customer retention has gained considerable attention in academic world. In this dissertation, we integrate the diversified perspectives on customer retention and identify two essential factors influencing customer retention: customers'trust on supplying enterprises and customers'switching barriers. Customers'trust means by perceiving the credibility and benevolence of supplier, thus customers develop reliance on it. Customers'switching barriers, comprising the attractiveness of the alternatives and the switching costs, indicate the difficulties customers may face if they shift from current supplier to alternatives.The main findings of this study are summarized as following:The nature of customer retention is involved customer trust and switching barriers. In practice, the theories of satisfaction or loyalty hardly explain the fact that dissatisfied customers keep relationship with their provider, while satisfying or loyal customers sometimes not. The research proves that customer trust and switching barriers are necessary condition for customer retention, either of them can not be respectively based upon analysis of literature and the case study.