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Factors Affect Customer Retention:
A Systematic Review
Salama S. Alkitbi
1
, Muhammad Alshurideh
1,2
,
Barween Al Kurdi
3
, and Said A. Salloum
4(&)
1
University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE
2
Faculty of Business, University of Jordan, Amman, Jordan
3
Amman Arab University, Amman, Jordan
4
Research Institute of Sciences and Engineering,
University of Sharjah, Sharjah, UAE
ssalloum@sharjah.ac.ae
Abstract. Many review studies were handled to provide valuable insights into
customer retention issues and factors that could influence it positively and
effectively. This study systematically reviews and analyzes customer retention
and its related factors of 30 research studies from 2005 to 2019. The main
findings contain that the most common factors that affect customer retention are
service quality, satisfaction, trust, and commitment. Moreover, most of the
customer retention studies were focused on the banking sector, followed by the
studies that concerned about retail industry issues. Additionally, most of the
conducted studies were undertaken in Indonesia, followed by Nigeria and India.
The findings of this review study provide an overview of the current studies and
analyses of customer retention and factors that affect it.
Keywords: Customer retention Satisfaction Trust Commitment
1 Introduction
Generally, it is recognized that there is a positive relationship between customer
retention and profitability. Customer retention enables the company to increase prof-
itability and revenue [1–3]. Thus, the small increase in customer retention could have a
positive impact on profitability [4–6]. [7,8] indicated that customer retention indicates
customer’s intention to repurchase a service or a product from the service provider. In
[9], authors defined customer retention as “the future propensity of a customer to stay
with the service provider. It should be a continuous process to find a customer and
retain them in a long-term relationship [10–12].
The purpose of the study is to review previous studies and to find out the main
influencing factors affecting the existing customer. In addition, the study aims to
investigate the impact of customer satisfaction, trust, and commitment on customer
retention in different sectors and contexts. The review study stands the following six
research questions:
©The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. E. Hassanien et al. (Eds.): AISI 2020, AISC 1261, pp. 656–667, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58669-0_59
RQ1: What are the main disciplines/contexts of the selected studies?
RQ2: What are the participating countries in the context of the selected studies?
RQ3: How reviews are distributed across their year of publication?
RQ4: What are the research methods of the selected studies?
RQ5: What are the active databases in the context of customer retention?
RQ6: What are the most factors that influence customer retention?
Thus, the importance of this study is in its attempt to contribute and add value to the
extant literature by covering up-to-date research studies on customer retention and its
attempt to explore some main factors that influence it over different countries such as
customer satisfaction, customer trust, and customer commitment. In addition, finding
out some contexts and disciplines in which customer retention and its influencing
factors were not explicitly searched and in detail.
The structure of this review study is as follows. Section 2reviews the literature
related to customer satisfaction, customer retention, trust, and commitment to exploring
the relationships between these concepts. Section 3shows the study methodology by
covering the inclusion/exclusion criteria, data sources and search strategies, quality
assessment, as well as data coding and analysis. The fourth section discusses the
results, followed by the proposed model and hypotheses. Finally, the fifth section
presents the conclusion with limitations and some recommendations.
2 Literature Review
Customer retention survives when the companies can fulfill customer expectations and
additionally maintain it in long-term relationships to ensure long-term buying decisions
[13–15]. The topic of customer retention is argued in business economics commonly
within the perspective of relationship marketing, which considers customer relation-
ships as one of the primary concerns with the long-term objective of developing and
maintaining them [16–18]. Many previous studies indicated that companies should
always manage customer satisfaction to achieve the retention stage. According to [19]
“satisfaction is an overall customer attitude towards a service provider”.In[20],
authors added that satisfaction is an emotional reaction regarding what customers
expect and what they receive, including the fulfillment of needs and goals. Customer
retention states a desired outcome in the future to satisfaction, so long-term of rela-
tionship is demonstrated by satisfaction. Although customer satisfaction does not
guarantee repurchase, it still plays a vital role in ensuring customer retention. While
many studies on customer retention had long focused on customer satisfaction, addi-
tional factors are stated as an influence in customer retention, such as trust and com-
mitment. [21], in “The Commitment-Trust Theory of Relationship Marketing,”which
is the most influential Relationship Marketing, suggests that the center of successful
relationship marketing is the relationship of commitment and trust. They urged the
importance of commitment and trust that leads to build a positive correlation between
company and customers and encourage efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness. The
degree of trust between service provider and customer is significantly influenced by the
quality of the service, which results in an effective commitment to the provider, and
Factors Affect Customer Retention: A Systematic Review 657
enhancing commitment is important since it leads to an intention to invest further and
reinforce the relationship with the provider.
As mentioned in the previous section, this review study will attempt to highlight the
recent findings of scholars about customer retention and explore some new or limited
contexts and countries in which literature did not covered enough and did not inves-
tigate and examine the relationship of customer retention with mainly satisfaction, trust,
and commitment.
3 Methods
The process of this review study for conducting a systematic review was guided by
Kitchenham and Charters’s guidelines [22]. This method is used by many scholars such
as [23–26]. Given that, the review was directed in four stages: the identification of
inclusion and exclusion criteria, data sources and search strategies, quality assessment,
and data coding and analysis. The details of these phases are shown in the following
sub-sections.
3.1 Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria
The studies that were critically analyzed in this review study meet the inclusion and
exclusion criteria described in Table 1.
3.2 Data Sources and Research Strategies
The studies were identified using different keywords that are related mainly to customer
retention and adding other factors such as satisfaction, trust, and commitment in several
searching processes until reaching a suitable number of related and targeted articles and
studies to select and analyze. Table 2shows the keywords search. The search process
Table 1. Inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Inclusion criteria Exclusion criteria
- Should involve Customer retention and should be in
Tittle
- Should involve one or all terms of satisfaction, trust, &
commitment, and could be in Tittle, abstract or
anywhere in the document
- Should be written in English
- Should be published between 2005 and 2019
- Could include articles, reports, or theses
- Any study that does not discuss
mainly customer retention
658 S. S. Alkitbi et al.
was conducted through five various journal databases which are ProQuest, Science-
Direct, Taylor, and Emerald, and Google Scholar as a search engine. The search was
done on a different day for several times started on Sunday, 26
th
Jan. 2020, and the last
search was on Saturday, 1
st
Feb. 2020. Initial search results which focus on searching
for customer retention as a title and other keywords in the title or abstract or anywhere
in a document across five online databases and google scholar are 137 studies. The
studies were downloaded and then filtered to remove the duplicate, which was 20
studies, so the studies became 117 studies, and the distribution of studies across the
database is presented in Table 3. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria to
select targeted studies, the studies became 105 studies. After screening studies and to
focus mainly on that studies involve good discussion and analysis for customer
retention and targeted factors that influence it, the selected studies to analyze for this
review systematic study are 30 studies. These 30 studies were applied to various
sectors, countries and published in the last 15 years ago. All processes are described in
Fig. 1.
Table 2. Data sources and databases
Keyword search
“Satisfaction”AND “Customer retention”
“Satisfaction”AND “Trust”AND “Customer
retention”
“Satisfaction”AND “Trust”AND
“commitment”AND “customer retention”
Table 3. The total number of articles.
Journal databases Frequency
ProQuest 51
ScienceDirect 22
Taylor 23
Emerald 15
Google Scholar 26
Total 137
Factors Affect Customer Retention: A Systematic Review 659
3.3 Quality Assessment
Quality assessment is another factor that could be applied to examine the studies’
quality, along with the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The quality assessment checklist
with 9 criteria was formulated to evaluate the quality of the research studies that were
selected for further analysis (N = 30). The quality assessment checklist is clarified in
Table 4. The checklist was adapted from those suggested by [22]. Each question was
scored according to the three-point scale, with a “Yes”being worth 1 point, “No”being
worth 0 point, and “Partially”being worth 0.5 point. Thus, each study could score
between 0 and 9, with the higher the total score a study gets, the higher the degree to
which this study addresses the research questions. Tables 5clarifies the quality
assessment results for all the 30 studies. All the studies have passed the quality
assessment, which means that all the studies are qualified to be used for analysis.
Fig. 1. PRISMA flowchart for the selected studies.
Table 4. Quality assessment criteria.
# Question
1 Are the research aims clearly specified?
2 Was the study designed to achieve these aims?
3 Are the variables considered by the study clearly specified?
4 Is the study context/discipline clearly specified?
5 Are the data collection methods adequately detailed?
6 Does the study explain the reliability/validity of the measures?
7 Are the statistical techniques used to analyze the data adequately described?
8 Do the results add to the literature?
9 Does the study add to your knowledge or understanding?
660 S. S. Alkitbi et al.
3.4 Data Coding and Analysis
The characteristics correlated to the research methodology quality were coded,
including database, authors, year of publication, the context of the studies, independent
& dependent factors, research method (quantitative, qualitative), sample size, and
mediators\moderators. During the analysis process and through extracting data from
selected studies, any study that didn’t clearly describe customer retention and its
relation with at least one of the targeted factors was excluded from the synthesis.
Table 5. Quality assessment results
Study Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Total Percentage
1. 0.51111110.50.57.583%
2. 11111110.50.58 88%
3. 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
4. 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
5. 11111110.518.594%
6. 1110.5111118.594%
7. 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 6 66%
8. 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
9. 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 6.5 72%
10. 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 1 0 0.5 0.5 0.5 5 55%
11. 0.5 0.5 1 1 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7 77%
12. 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
13. 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 6 66%
14. 1110.510.51118 88%
15. 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
16. 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 7 77%
17. 1 0.5 1 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 1 6.5 72%
18. 1 1 0.5 1 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 6.5 72%
19. 1 1 0.5 1 0.5 0 1 0.5 0.5 6 66%
20. 1 1 0.5 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 6.5 72%
21. 11111110.50.58 88%
22. 111110.510.50.57.583%
23. 11110.50.510.50.57 77%
24. 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
25. 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
26. 1 1 1 0.5 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 7.5 83%
27. 1 1 1 0.5 1 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 7 77%
28. 11110.50.50.50.50.56.572%
29. 1 1 1 0.5 0.5 0.5 1 0.5 0.5 6.5 72%
30. 111110.510.50.57.583%
Factors Affect Customer Retention: A Systematic Review 661
4 Result
Based on the 30 studies published on Customer retention from 2005 to 2020, the results
of this systematic review are reported according to the six research questions.
4.1 Distribution of the Studies in Terms of Disciplines/Contexts
Context/discipline is a study field, sector, or industry that is researched in customer
retention. In this research, the collected articles were distributed across the
disciplines/contexts. The banking sector is the most context that attracts most studies to
investigate customer retention and factors that influence it. According to 30 studies that
were conducted in this research, about seven studies were focusing on the banking
sector. The second most attractive context is the mobile phone market that about five
studies form conducted studies examined customer retention with other factors in this
field. While the less investigated filed is the hotel or hospitality industry, which is
recommended for more exploration. Figure 2represents the distribution of the entire
collected articles across the context/discipline that these studies were conducted.
4.2 Distribution of the Studies in Terms of Countries in the Context
The majority of these studies were carried out in Indonesia with four studies. Then,
three studies were carried out in Nigeria and India. This is followed by Jordan, Pak-
istan, Malaysia, and Korea, with two studies for each. Form different other countries,
Fig. 2. Distribution of studies in terms of context/discipline.
662 S. S. Alkitbi et al.
one study at least was analyzed in this study. Figure 3describes the distribution of all
conducted articles across the countries in which these research studies were
investigated.
4.3 Distribution of the Studies in Terms of Publication Year
In terms of publication year, Fig. 4shows the distribution of the analyzed studies
across the years in which these studies were published. The studies are conducted from
2005 to 2019. It is obvious that the number of published studies was increased from
one study in 2005 to about 4 to 6 in recent years. Furthermore, there is a remarkable
increase of published articles in 2013 and 2019.
Fig. 3. Distribution of studies in terms of country.
Fig. 4. Distribution of studies in terms of publication year.
Factors Affect Customer Retention: A Systematic Review 663
4.4 Distribution of the Studies in Terms of Research Method
Based on research method distribution, it is clear that the majority of conducted studies
were depended on quantitative method for about 80% of 30 selected studies and that
was mainly relied on questionnaire surveys for collecting data. Three studies were
applied qualitative method with main interviews. Respectively. Moreover, both
methods were applied in 2 studies from 30 conducted studies. Figure 5shows the
distribution of the studies in terms of research methods.
4.5 Distribution of the Studies in Terms of Database
This study was searching for customer retention and another variable in four main
databases, which were Taylor, ProQuest, Emerald, & ScienceDirect, in addition to
search on google scholar engines. The majority of the conducted studies were selected
form google scholar, as shown in Fig. 6with about 20 studies, as it is the most
productive among others, followed by the emerald database with four studies and two
studies from ProQuest, ScienceDirect, and Taylor databases.
Fig. 5. Distribution of studies in terms of research method.
Fig. 6. Distribution of studies in terms of database.
664 S. S. Alkitbi et al.
5 Conclusion
This review study aims to review previous studies to find out the main influencing
factors that affect customer retention and mainly, investigate the impact of the customer
satisfaction, trust, and commitment on customer retention in different sectors and
contexts through the various database and search engine across various years of pub-
lications [27–30]. Previous customer retention literature studies provided valuable
results on the relationship of customer retention with other factors that the companies
could take in their consideration to empower their development and gain a competitive
advantage over competitors [31–34]. But still, there are many variables that could be
examined in different sectors, and that what this review study tries to highlight through
analyzing around 30 studies. The selected studies were conducted through certain
processes and specific criteria. The quality of the conducted studies was assessed before
analyzing applying inclusion\exclusion criteria as well as the quality assessment
checklist with nine criteria. The main terms of analysis are independent and dependent
variables, year of publication, context, country, database, and method. The main
finding of this review is that the main factors that affect customer retention positively
are customer satisfaction, service quality, trust, commitment, and loyalty [35–38]. As
mentioned in previous sections, some variables like trust and loyalty and their relations
with other external factors need further explanation, especially in the hospitality
industry like hotels. Moreover, most of the analyzed studies had limited sample size or
group and that makes it difficult for generalization since it didn’t represent all popu-
lation for example, a study [39] in which its samples were students, so the study’s
results may not be generalized to non-student populations. In addition, this review has
focused in some databases to collect previous studies, so it is recommended to expand
research in another database to find other valuable studies such as Scopus and IEEE
and also in different industries.
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