Relationship marketing and its effects towards customers' satisfaction: a case study on Cari Sparepart Sdn. Bhd. / Khairol Azli Othman

Relationship marketing is an importance strategy to implement by the company in order to success in the market. Through relationship marketing, every company will create the total customers satisfaction in competing with their competitors, The relationship strategic becomes a heart of the company to get better profitability's and stronger sustainable competitive advantage. Building a good relationship with
customers is necessary and should be one of the company's main goals , Relationship marketing allows the company to focus on quality, customer service and marketing in order to maintain and build up good relationship with their customers. The linkages between quality, customer service and marketing must be exploited to achieve total customer's satisfaction and long-term relationship.

From the research observation, many companies are still not noticeable towards the important of relationship marketing. CSSB is one of the company for example, which the researcher found it is still lacking in practicing of "relationship marketing" in their marketing activities whereby the company is still didn't have any special department to handle customer's requests, the follow-up after sales only done to a small number of customers, the service provided is only at a time of purchased and CSSB will only meet their customers once a year when the time of collecting payment for tile advertising services of their customer's website. Moreover, CSSB also didn't have activities or program to initiate a long term relationship with customers such as sending cards; asking they how the service offered, meet the customers and etc.

Based on the problem statement, this research was conducted to achieve these objectives: (1) to study the effects of relationship marketing towards customers' satisfaction, (2) to determine strengths and weaknesses of CSSB In building and maintaining their relationship with customers and (3) to find-out and sub sequentiy to recommend the appropriate relationship marketing strategies to increase the customers' satisfaction.

In terms of research methodology and design, 70 questionnaires had being distributed to the CSSB customers such as car dealers, manufacturers, suppliers, and workshops at Selayang and Klang Valley areas. However, only 47 questionnaires were successful colleted. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) has been used to analyze the data in terms of frequencies and cross-tabulation.

From the finding, it can be summarized the.t relationship marketing has a positive effect towards customers' satisfaction especially in terms of efficiency and friendliness, level of pricing and relationship with customers. It is also found that all of the variables which had being mentioned earlier become the strengths of CSSB. Several weaknesses has also to be focus by CSSB such as in terms of after sales services, incentives given; punctuality of services and the level of CSSB staffs
encounter the customers' problem effectively in order to create good relationship with their customers and to make them satisfied with the services or products offered.

From the study, several recommendations for maintaining good relationship and subsequently satisfy the customers were obtained from the respondents, which are: {1} focus on customers and quality orientation and (2) increase and maintain quality of services, Therefore, from the researcher opinion, CSSB should improve their management; such as marketing team, advertising and web designer in order to increase staffs' performance and also focus on services provided in order to deliver only what customers wants and needs. In maintaining relationship, it is important to create commitment, satisfaction and trust between staffs and their customers by providing high standard of quality in services or products offered.