مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The multichannel marketing environment is becoming increasingly prevalent in recent years. Firms and their customers can interact via brick-and-mortar stores, catalogs, online stores, emails and in recent years mobile platforms, and multichannel marketing has become an important tool to motivate customers to shop more frequently through increased interaction and to build lasting customer relationships (Hansotia and Rukstales 2002; Rangaswamy and Van Bruggen 2005). In addition, multichannel firms are looking for strategies to increase customer retention and avoid customer churn, as the costs of customer acquisition are much higher than that of retention, and small increases in retention could drive large profit increases (Pfeifer and Farris 2004; Reichheld and Sasser 1990). Specifically, Gupta and Lehmann (2003) assert that an increase in retention of 5% yields a dramatic 22% to 37% increase in customer lifetime value.

Given the prevalence of the multichannel environment and the importance of customer retention, it is crucial for both marketing academics and practitioners to study the link between these two areas in order to answer the question of how to increase customer retention and thus increase customer value in multichannel settings. However, such research is particularly difficult for firms in non-contractual settings (e.g. most retail settings such as Nordstrom, Sephora, L.L. Bean, and the recently opened Amazon stores), because the termination of relationships is difficult to observe, and thus retention rates cannot be easily evaluated. Our research framework studies customer retention in multichannel settings, while accounting for issues in non-contractual settings.

Most extant research on customer retention has either focused on highlighting the importance of retention on customer lifetime value (Gupta and Lehmann 2003; Pfeifer and Farris 2004; Reichheld and Sasser 1990) or on attempting to estimate the impacts of various factors on relationship length in contractual settings that require accurate information about the termination of the relationship (Boehm 2008; Schweidel, Fader, and Bradlow 2008). From a channel perspective, some studies have examined the impact of Internet use (specifically, online banking) on service termination (customer retention) (Boehm 2008; Campbell and Frei 2010; Hitt and Frei 2002; Verhoef and Donkers 2005). Those studies are also based on contractual settings.