Research On The Influencing Factors Of Customer Loyalty Of A Bank Credit Card Business

On November 11,2006, China promulgated and formally implemented the Regulations on the Administration of Foreign-funded Banks, which marked that the banking industry in China has entered the era of full and open development. Since foreign-funded banks continue to carve up the Chinese market, the domestic banks are confronted with unprecedented pressure. As a result, they begin to adjust their development strategies to promote the cross-regional business to a strategic level. The competition pattern of China's banking market will face a reshuffle. In other words, "product" is no longer the marketing orientation of the banking industry. Under the increasingly competitive market environment, only when banks grasp the users will they have sustainable competitive advantages. As a representative of retail banking business, credit card has a strong customer base. Moreover, since credit card is characterized by fast accumulation of wealth, it is widely respected by the banking industry. It is considered to be a promising retail business.In order to meet the market changes, the major banks have established customer management mechanisms. They hope to establish and maintain long-term and stable cooperative relationships with customers through customer relationships, thereby driving the further development of the credit card business. Domestic banks have begun to build customer relationships. According to the results of a survey on customers, however, the citizens are not very satisfied with the products and services provided by domestic banks. Among all the users, only 30% of them are expected to become loyal clients. Thus, the establishment of customer relationships varies considerably between Chinese banks and international banks. In addition, there is still a long way for Chinese banks to go in customer retention and construction of customer loyalty.For banks that are developing cross-regional businesses, the credit card business also reflects their competitiveness to some extent. The credit card business of Chinese commercial banks has experienced rapid development for nearly nine years. Since banks always advocate scale development, they only attach importance to the scale while ignoring products. Consequently, serious homogenization appears in the credit card businesses of the various banks. Due to the excessive homogenization, the majority of customers become numb for credit card products. It is difficult for them to prefer or rely on the credit card business of individual banks. This is why there are numerous credit cardholders in China but the customer loyalty of credit card is low. They can not grasp loyal customers, which means that they fail to completely hold the credit card market. What's more, the research object of this paper-A Bank-began to engage in the credit card business in 2007. It started late and lacked marketing experience. In the early operation, it paid excessive attention to the development of the credit card business. Nevertheless, it ignored the construction of marketing strategies. Nor did it develop value-added services for products in time. Consequently, Bank A is weak in the credit card customer base, with low viscosity. Besides, customer churns occur frequently. In order to support the virtuous development of the credit card business of Bank A and avoid the exacerbation of customer churns, this paper intends to find out the reasons for low credit card customer loyalty of Bank A and factors influencing customer loyalty through analysis and researches.The paper is divided into five chapters. Chapter One introduces the development background and situation of the credit card business of domestic banks. It raises the question to be studied in this paper from the perspective of customer loyalty. Chapter Two presents theories related to customer loyalty and then summarizes the research status of this subject. In addition, it comments on the research status. Based on Chapter Two, Chapter Three builds evaluation models of customer loyalty. It selects evaluation indicators and methods. Chapter Four is based on the evaluation models of customer loyalty built in Chapter Three. It obtains data from questionnaires and screens main factors influencing customer loyalty from the various indicators through factor analysis. As for Chapter Five, it summarizes the screened factors and problems in the operation of the credit card business of Bank A. Moreover, it puts forward countermeasures to improve credit card customer loyalty of Bank A, hoping to help Bank A improve the number, quality and viscosity of credit card users and improve the comprehensive values of the credit card business.