Kundenbindung im Bankbereich - Beschwerdemanagement als Kundenbindungsinstrument

Abstract

In marketing research, there has been done a lot of work on customer complaints. Most of these studies, however, consider only the customer’s point of view. By contrast, there are few research projects that focus on complaint management from a company’s point of view. The present thesis is meant to fill this research gap and take up both the customer’s and primarily the company’s perspective. It investigates the individual client in the banking sector of two major German banks. The thesis mainly aims at identifying the requirements for organizing and planning a successful and effective complaint management within banking institutions. The chosen approach to research was exploratory in nature. It involved presenting available empirical data within Dresdner and Commerzbank AG based on my own investigations, assigning them to core research areas, carrying out a causal analysis and proposing suitable solutions/ results for the corporate practice. This was followed by an exploratory survey among 30 experts from the investigated enterprise on how to deal with complaints, on the acceptance of variable compensation in the banking business and on the requirements for organizing and planning a successful complaint management. Furthermore, the raw data to be analyzed included documents collected from the banking practice as well as from observations and field experience made during my long years of professional and management functions in the complaint management of investigated banks. The thesis highlights theoretical principles of complaint / quality management, customer loyalty and satisfaction. Here, one of my tasks was to describe complaint management as the core of customer relationship management (CRM). Another task was to categorize complaint management into different quality models, such as EFQM, GAP, TQM, KVP and other approaches to quality management. As a result of these investigations, I both generated hypotheses and drew conclusions and recommendations on the future organization of complaint management in banking businesses to increase customer loyalty. The results confirmed the need to respond to the desires, concerns and suggestions of unsatisfied banking customers and to place high strategic value on the complaint management Annotation V in order to achieve the corporate goals. Banking institutions should reduce the number of causes that might give rise to complaints and increase the share of customers who approach the respective institution to voice their concerns, criticisms and desires. The management must establish a culture of complaint that allows mistakes to be made. With regard to further research activities, it is above all the requirements for organizing and planning the complaint management that are becoming more prevalent in dealing with complaints and mistakes, particularly in the light of a targeted manipulation of changes in the attitude and behaviour of employees and managers. Any studies already initiated on the topic of introducing variable remuneration amounts for employees and managers, which will be calculated according to customer satisfaction, should be continued within the banking practice and based much more on sustainability.