The Effect of Customer Relationship Management On Brand Equity, The Case of Bank of Abyssinia

The survival of any organization depends on its customers. Customers are the source of profits to be earned by a profit-making organization. Due to the more and fiercer competition in today’s business, many companies are required to build long-term profitable relationship with customers and to achieve customer loyalty. Therefore, customer relationship management has become more and more important since last decade of 20th century, especially in-service industry. There are many different customer relationship management dimensions implemented for building brand equity. Therefore, this study is aimed to explore the influence of customer relationship management dimensions (Knowledge management, Technology based management, Customer involvement, Long term association and Joint problem solving) on brand equity, by focusing on the Bank of Abyssinia. A theoretical framework was developed and used as a guideline to test the relationships between relationship management dimensions and brand equity. Both qualitative and quantitative method which is cross-sectional study with deductive approach is chosen in this research. In order to collect primary data, a self-completed questionnaire is designed and was given to the customers of the Bank of Abyssinia. In addition to questionnaire, semi structured interview questions are prepared to get information from the organization which is analyzed qualitatively. The SPSS version 20 for windows is used to process the primary data which is collected through questionnaire. The findings show that The Four independent variables (knowledge management, customer involvement, joint problem solving, and technology-based management) are significantly related to brand equity however long term association has no significant impact on brand equity particularly in Bank of Abyssinia. Therefore, banks should make the whole system on work with customers, not in opposite of customers. And also they are expected to invest more to build and enhance brand equity with regard to customer relationship management