Factors affecting the loyalty of policyholders (case study of Asia insurance companies in Gilan province)

Academic thesis for obtaining a master's degree in the field: business management, insurance orientation

Abstract

Customer loyalty is a major issue in marketing research and is considered as a major concern of managers and a permanent strategic thinking

for many organizations. The reason for the double importance of this topic is due to the fierce competition especially in service activities and currently it is focused on the relationships between customers and organizations and the marketing approach is relationships. All companies that have superior performance in different industries are moving towards maintaining existing customers and creating loyalty in them; Because the competition is increasing and the cost of attracting new customers is extremely high. Therefore, in this research, we investigate the factors affecting the loyalty of insurance policyholders of Asian insurance companies in Gilan province. The purpose of the research is applied, and the research plan is a correlational description. Also, the current research includes four hypotheses that we investigated the relationships in the research with the Pearson correlation test, and finally, we prioritized the factors affecting the loyalty of insurance policyholders by the Friedman test. The above analyzes were done by SPSS software. At the end, all the hypotheses in the research were confirmed and the results showed that the perceived image of the company, perceived quality, customer satisfaction and trust are effective factors in customer loyalty. Also, having confidence, easy access to the company's representatives and employee interactions with insurers were the first to third priorities of customer loyalty, respectively. Key words: perceived quality, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, perceived image of the company, trust.

Introduction

Customer loyalty is a major topic in marketing research and is considered as a major concern of managers and a permanent strategic thinking for many organizations. The reason for the double importance of this topic is due to the fierce competition especially in service activities and currently it is focused on the relationships between customers and organizations and the marketing approach is relationships. All companies that have superior performance in different industries are moving towards maintaining existing customers and creating loyalty in them; Because the competition is increasing and the cost of attracting new customers is extremely high. Also, maintaining customers and creating loyalty in them is considered vital for the continuation of business, and many researchers point out and emphasize the existence of a positive relationship between customer loyalty and business performance. Customer loyalty for companies has advantages such as reducing the sensitivity of customers to changes and prices, selling diverse and ancillary products to a customer, selling upgraded and new products to enter a customer's market, increasing barriers to the entry of new competitors, and so on.

In commercial service organizations there are reasons such as; The small number of customers, the continued use of services by them, the high importance of maintaining and strengthening long-term relationships of the organization with customers, closer and deeper relationships with customers have caused more attention to be paid to the factors affecting customer loyalty to these organizations.

Until yesterday, marketers were only thinking about finding customers and the sales team was looking for new customers, but in today's view, marketing means growing customers and paying attention to satisfaction and service quality from the customer's point of view. Nowadays, the art of marketing is that the customers of an organization are collaborators inside the organization and supporters and supporters of the organization outside the organization.

According to what has been said in the next chapter, firstly, the research problem and the importance and necessity of the research position have been stated, and then according to the theoretical framework of the research, the research model has been extracted and hypotheses based on the model have been designed. In the following, we will discuss the conceptual and operational definitions of the research and state the goals and scope of the research.

1-2) Statement of the problem

Today, with the competitiveness of the markets and continuous changes in the environment, organizations have realized the fact that they are no longer facing an expanding economic system and growing markets as in the past; Therefore, each customer has its own special value, and one must fight to gain a greater share of the market. In the current period, customer commitment has found a special place and customer growth and effective communication with him makes the customers of an organization to be colleagues inside and outside the organization to support and support it.Therefore, only customers who have a sense of belonging and are profitable and long-lived are considered capital for our organization (Tsokatos and Rand [1], 2006, p. 400). In the new era of marketing, the goal is to establish long-term and mutual relationships with interested groups and, most importantly, customers in such a way as to retain more customers and in this way, in the long term, benefits will be obtained, which will increase the market share and profitability of companies. Paying attention to services and using new technologies does not seem enough for him; Therefore, the customer is the only thing that matters and companies should put him at the center of their activities and use solutions and strategies to bring back lost customers and keep their current customers (Cutler and Armstrong [2], 2008, p. 100).

In the new era, attention to the growth and development of customer loyalty has increased as an important factor in the marketing strategy of companies that leads to the retention of current customers. Today, the concept of customer loyalty is proposed as a guideline for increasing income. But maybe this is the first step in the evolution of the topic of customer orientation (Andiobase [3], 2007, p. 99). The results of the research of Richheld and Sasser [4] (1990) showed that a 5% decrease in the number of customers causes a loss of 85% of profit and also a 5% increase in keeping existing customers increases the profit by 25 to 125%. Based on the principle of customer orientation, an organization that wants to excel must create sustainable value for the customer and act beyond their expectations and know that customers are the final judges of the quality of the organization's products and services. Leading organizations maximize indicators such as market share, customer trust and loyalty by focusing on customer expectations and customer retention. These organizations are responsive to customers' expectations and for this purpose they check the level of satisfaction of their customers and try to improve it (Hari et al., 2018, p. 32). Based on marketing theory and practical experience, companies should improve their performance to satisfy customers so that they can achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in a highly competitive business environment. Because the main result of customer satisfaction is customer loyalty, and companies benefit from a large share of loyal customers due to increased repurchase rates, high potential buyers, willingness to pay higher prices, positive recommendation behavior, and low replacement costs (Bran Wegrund [5], 2000, p. 1017). Due to the vital role of customer satisfaction and loyalty, analysis of the relationship of these variables is generally accepted and should be compared among companies, industries, sectors and nations. Trust is an important factor to increase customer loyalty (Fournier [6], 1998, p. 301). Therefore, when the customer trusts the brand, the customer will probably show a positive attitude towards the brand. To trust the brand, customers must not only understand the positive consequences (Lao and [7] Lee, 1999, p. 80). Rather, they must believe. that these positive consequences will continue in the future. However, it is known that the positive outcome of the brand will lead to satisfaction. As a result, there should be a positive relationship between customer satisfaction and trust (Aydin and Zar [8], 2005, p. 487).

Trust is based on past behavior. And it enables people to think about the future and thus commit to each other. When a buyer trusts a seller, the buyer and the seller are more prepared to lose short-term benefits due to the firm belief in the potential future relationship (Walter and Ritter [9], 2003, p. 354).

The perceived image of the company, the general inference of the consumer from the service provider center based on his current and previous position against the stimuli. Since the image of the company affects the behavior of the stakeholders in the interaction with the company, organizations should pay attention to the management of their image. (Yolha et al. [10], 2009, p. 21). The perceived quality of the software means a part of the quality that represents the interactive elements in the service provided, such as the behavior of the personnel or the characteristics of the service delivery environment. This variable has 3 dimensions of service before and after the sale, dealing with the customer and ease of purchase (Haqighi et al., 2019, p. 85).