Eureka! Institutional Repository

Contemporary economy force companies to depart from traditional marketing doctrines and adopt a customercentric approach by focusing on managing customer relationships. Banks were among the pioneers in developing and implementing relationship marketing strategies, since they were between the first recipients of the radical changes that took place in global economy in recent years. This study is part of an ongoing research project aiming to develop an instrument to measure the outcome of the implementation of relationship marketing strategies by investigating how customers experience this approach. Field research was conducted among customers of Greek banks, utilizing an intervieweradministered questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis was then performed on the collected data in order to identify latent factors among the questionnaire items. The results obtained were very encouraging, since 7 factors were extracted. Following an examination of the items’ loadings on each factor, they were labeled as relationship value, crisis management, personalized sales, customer focus, flexibility, communication quality and reliability. Future work involves the verification and refinement of the emerged instrument’s dimensions by executing field research in different business settings. Furthermore, the examination of the instrument’s dimensions effects on typical relationship marketing performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction, loyalty and switching barriers, is also planned.