Factors Influencing Customer Loyalty Of Credit Card Market For College Students

It has been seven years from the first credit card for students was put into the campus. MasterCard made an investigation about the credit card for students in 2007, and the result showed that there were 24% of students who had applied credit card. But actually these card were not totally been used. Because of lower usage rate and expenditure, even the using cards that bring limited profit. In the same time, every bank is trying their best to attract new card applier. It appears that the marketing strategy has been in a dilemma. In order to change this situation, this paper proposes to improve the customer loyalty of credit card for students. So the key is how to promote customer loyalty.After the review of customer loyalty, it appeared that most of the scholars paid attention to the effect factor and driven model on customer loyalty, while few scholars look into the classification of the customer loyalty. For the purpose to fill in the blank, this paper is going to classify all customers before analyze the effect factor of loyalty, according to the customer satisfaction, switching cost and customer perceived service quality. It is the detail next.Based on the study on customer loyalty and its effect factor, a questionnaire was designed to inquiry the loyalty of the credit card users.400 individual customers took part in this survey, and there were 326 questionnaires chosen into analyze. In the bases of the data, all customers were sorted into three clusters, according to customer satisfaction, switching cost and customer perceived service quality, with cluster analysis. These clusters were named as "High-loyalty customers", "Unstable customers" and "Low-loyalty customers". Then with multivariate statistical analysis in SPSS 15.0, we find the main factors that influent customer loyalty in every cluster.There are about 16% customers in the high loyalty cluster. The loyalty, satisfaction and perceived service quality of these customers are higher in all customers, while their switching cost is lower than others. And their customer loyalty mainly influent by satisfaction and functional lost. Nearly 40% customers were unstable customers. Their characteristic was high switching cost, while their loyalty, satisfaction and perceived service quality are in the middle level. The customer loyalty of these customers were affected by switching cost, satisfaction and perceived service quality. Other customers are in low loyalty, low satisfaction, low perceived service quality and low switching cost, and this is why we call them "Low-loyalty customers". Customer satisfaction and perceived service quality will play an important role on the "Low-loyalty customers".According to the analysis above, to be the first, it would be better to pay more attention to the college students'loyalty to the credit card for the banks. Secondly, it was not a good method to promote single marketing strategy to all students, and to take different strategy to different customer is more useful than that. Of course, before promoting marketing strategy, it is necessary to classify all customers on the basis of customer loyalty to the credit card for the banks. At last, what the banks should do is only to control process of the strategy and get more profit.