Dependable customer indicator

One of the difficulties encountered by marketing practioners is to be able to determine how secure or dependable their customer base is. Single measures, such as customer service quality or satisfaction, are not in themselves strong predictors of retention intentions. A means of combining several measures of customer perspectives could provide a more comprehensive indicator of customer retention. This paper describes a study to provide an indicator of customer retention, or churn rate depending on the perspective. A sample of 187 customers was asked to provide their views and opinions about the bank they principally used for personal banking. In addition, the respondents were asked to rate how important to them the dimensions of a relationship with their bank were. A Dependable Customer Indicator is developed that has a much stronger relationship with retention intentions than individual measures. Further, the distribution of the DCI provides richer data of retention intentions than any single measure.