Dimensions
of Relational Marketing
Gronroos,
the famous specialist in service marketing, has established the following
dimensions of relational marketing
1. Focus
on the consumer in the long term.
2. Make and maintain promises to the consumers.
3. Involve the organization with the marketing activities.
4. Promote interactivity in the marketing processes.
5. Develop a consumer service culture.
6. Obtain and use consumer information.
Once the
relational marketing plan has been put into practice, it is necessary
to measure the clients’ satisfaction. In order to know how satisfied
clients are, we can follow various procedures:
1. The
first step is to establish a procedure to deal with complaints and
suggestions.
2. Another important system to obtain informational systematically
is to get clients to carry out questionnaires. In the questionnaires
the clients can measure certain aspects of the service. For example,
the cleanliness of the restaurant. It is also interesting to ask
the consumer to indicate how the company can improve to increase
the quality of the services. Later you can develop a process to
analyze problems.
3. Secret buyer. A specialist carries out a secret purchase and
values the different aspects of the service he received.
4. Lost clients. Gather and analyze information about lost clients.
Find out why the clients left.
5. Study of critical incidents. What phases are fundamental and
which ones suggest problems?
6. Investigate the consumer’s demands. Investigate the services
that the consumers desire.
7. Investigate future expectations. Try to anticipate the consumer’s
future demands. Quickly detecting tendencies that are arising can
give us a certain competitive advantage.
