A model of customer loyalty in the retail banking market

During the past two decades, there has been growing trend in Iranian banking industry due to change in banking regulations. Private sector has grown rapidly and there have been several new banks on the market, which has created very competitive market. Therefore, customer loyalty is the key factor for running a successful banking business and customer relationship management (CRM) appears to be important for the success in this industry. The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the relationship between CRM and customer loyalty in one of the oldest Iranian banks named Bank Melli Iran. The proposed study prepares a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among some regular customers of this bank. The preliminary results of this survey have indicated that consumer’s gender, age and educational background had no meaningful impact on quality of services. In other words, people with different personal characteristics expect the same quality of services from banking industry and there is a positive and meaningful relationship between quality of services and customer loyalty.