RELATIONSHIP APPROACH AND CLIENT LOYALTY IN MFIs

The high intensity of competition, low growth rate, and market saturation in the microfinance industry, leads to the fact that it has become very difficult to achieve long-term growth through an offensive strategy where the objective is to have long-term profit or growth through the means of market expansion or market share (by gaining new customers) and increasing turnover. Therefore, many companies opt for a defensive marketing strategy where the central objective is the customer and his satisfaction. That is to say, building a high rate of loyalty among existing customers. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of some important components in relationship marketing (trust, commitment, communication and satisfaction) on loyalty (cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, conative loyalty and action loyalty) in the microfinance sector in the city of Goma. The simple regression analyses show the existence of a relationship between loyalty and relationship marketing with customer satisfaction as an important dimension.