Strengthening Customer Loyalty: Exploring the Role of Relationship Marketing in Sri Lanka’s Public Sector Banks

Abstract

Customer loyalty is seen as critical to the long-term success of businesses, where relationship marketing has emerged as a key strategy used to attract, maintain, and enhance customer relationships. However, past studies have found significant differences between factors affecting customer loyalty and satisfaction between private and public sector banks, with calls for public sector banks to adopt more dynamic marketing strategies to bridge such gaps. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the impact of relationship marketing on customer loyalty in the context of the public sector banks in Sri Lanka. More specifically, this study examined the direct relationship between trust, commitment, communication, and conflict handling, which are seen as key attributes of relationship marketing with customer loyalty of public sector commercial banks in Sri Lanka. The study used a convenient sampling design with 384 respondents acquired through a structured questionnaire, which captured state commercial bank customers in the Colombo district of Sri Lanka. Data analysis was done using correlation and regression techniques with the support of SPSS software. The findings suggest that all four variables associated with relationship marketing significantly explain the variations in customer loyalty. These findings differ from those of past studies focusing on private sector banks that found trust and communication to be the key relationship attributes that lead to customer loyalty. This research contributes to the limited body of knowledge on relationship marketing and customer loyalty in the public banking sector. It also provides critical input to public sector bankers on avenues for strengthening customer loyalty from a customer relationship perspective.