Customer loyalty program based on quality function deployment with fuzzy linguistic preference relation

Abstract

The competition among shopping malls is getting increasingly more intense.In order to enhance corporate competitiveness and profitability, how toretain key loyal customers has become an important issue for the managers ofshopping malls. Customer loyalty programs are a universal practice. Thisstudy proposes an analytical model for developing the strategic managementof customer loyalty programs. Based on quality function deployment, ourmodel constructs a fuzzy relational matrix to integrate the customerbenefits and the customer loyalty programs. The results contribute to abetter understanding of the different importance of customer benefits withrespect to ``Utilitarian benefits'', ``Hedonic benefits'' and ``Symbolicbenefits''. The study's findings provide prioritized customer loyaltyprograms, including ``Newest information transmissions,'' ``Communicationservice specialists,'' ``Exclusive free gift promotions,'' and ``VIP loungeservice,'' which can be used to determine the directions for the improvementof shopping malls. The study has implications for the theory andpractitioners. First, it allows the integration of customer benefits incustomer loyalty programs and the consideration of VIP customers inthe programs. Second, the requirement evaluation considering fuzzylinguistic preferences allows for prioritizing the customer loyalty programswhen dealing with uncertainty and vagueness. Finally, this approach helps toobtain more realistic results by integrating fuzzy decision-making into QFD.