Identifying and Prioritizing the Relationship Marketing Factors Affecting the Customer Satisfaction with Services Section of the Tejarat Bank through the Application of Q Methodology

The present research project aims at studying the impressions and beliefs of the customers of Tejarat Bank in order to identify and prioritize the factors of relationship marketing which help increase the satisfaction of the customers with the service section of Tejarat Bank of Hamadan, Iran. It is a mixed exploratory study conducted based on Q methodology. The statistical community of the study comprised all the customers of the central branch of the bank who had, at least, one kind of account in it and were considered as active customers. Finally 30 customers were aimfully selected for the study by using a focused group discussion technique. Based on the interviews conducted with the customers through focused group discussions, 21 Q phrases were extracted. The phrases were then handed out to the customers in the form of a questionnaire with 21 items and an answer sheet (Q diagram). They were asked to give their agreement or disagreement with the items provided. Then after collecting the data which were gained through regulating the Q, they were analyzed by using factor-analysis method. The results thus found showed that the customers have introduced the five cases of trust, commitment, conflict handling, relationship and competence as the main factors of relationship marketing. The identified factors were then prioritized, and this showed that, from the viewpoints of the customers, the variables of trust, commitment and conflict handling were the most important ones in increasing the customer satisfaction.