Correlation on customer value towards customer relationship management performance in the credit card industry.

The credit card industry is booming aggressively in Malaysia with 8.8 million credit card holders nationwide, and each having three cards on an average. Sixty per cent of credit card holders pay their bills on time (NST, January 26, 2007). Relationship is an important criterion in the selection of a private bank among customers (Abratt & Russell, 1999). Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is proposed as the most up to date strategy in maintaining long term customer relationships in a variety businesses in the services industry. CRM is an advancement of relationship marketing, now involving concepts of the overall marketing concept, total quality management, internal marketing, customer care, and relationship marketing (Lancaster & Reynolds, 2005). Since CRM is touted as an important strategy in modern day business activities by marketing experts, this paper investigates the antecedents of customer value on CRM performance in the credit card industry in Malaysia. From 100 questionnaires distributed to academicians on a random basis, 35 returned questionnaires were analyzed. The study found that functional value, emotional value and social value influenced CRM performance in the credit card industry. Functional value scored the highest mean (3.5), followed by emotional value (3.4) and social value (3.2). This study concurs with previous findings in China (Wang et al., 2004) which investigated the same factors on CRM performance in the security service industry.