Abstract:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps businesses maintain long-term relationships with consumers while increasing profitability. CRM has evolved into electronic CRM or E-CRM, because of rapid improvements in Internet penetration. Electronic consumer relationships have become a crucial success factor for any company to maintain and preserve a competitive advantage. Previous studies have found that retaining existing customers is less costly than acquiring new customers. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of Electronic Customer Relationship Management (E-CRM) of e-commerce websites on customer retention and to examine the mediating effect of customer loyalty on the relationship between E-CRM and Customers retention. A quantitative study was conducted where primary data was collected using an online structured questionnaire. The sample was drawn from e-commerce users who experienced E-CRM. SPSS software was used for hypotheses testing. Results of the study proved that E-CRM technologies of e-commerce websites have significant effect on customer retention and the relationship is partially mediated by the customer loyalty. Moreover, the direct impact of E-CRM is higher than the indirect impact of customer loyalty on customer retention. This study highlighted the importance of implementing E-CRM strategies to retain existing customers and the synergistic effect of both E-CRM and customer loyalty to build the relationship. Further, this study stressed the need of identifying the black-box between E-CRM and Customer Retention.
