The impact of customer retention strategies to the performance of dairy industry in Tanzania: A survey study of dairy producers companies of southern highland in Tanzania

Abstract

Customer retention is a challenging obligation for both goods and dairy producing companies, primarily customer retention play a greater role on the performance of the industry, all organization strive to market dominance for strategic performance of their companies. The challenges associated with failures of many companies on retaining their potential buyers is resulted from failure of creating personal relationship with clients as it is a strong bond tying customers to the firm. Other factors affecting customer’s retention strategies are the firms’ ability to convey confidence to get the customers involved and to be able to deliver good quality services, satisfaction and the creation of switching barriers are the main strategies employed by the firms. So far now, many studies have been done to investigate measures and instrument used by the firms to retain the customer for sustenance of business firms. The area of previous researches covered mainly financial institutions and some beverage producing industries, there is so far limited research on customer retention of dairy companies as an emerging substitute of soft drinks due to introduction of flavored products like milk shakes, flavored yoghurt and flavored cheese. This thesis was done to mitigate the gap. Therefore, factors that are influential on the retention of customers of dairy products were collected and analyzed from the employees of ASAS Dairies Company, Njombe Milk Factory and Mbarali Estate Company. The finding of this research revealed that companies do not apply any standardized monitoring of clients, any loyalty programs nor customer clubs as well as any standardized recovery strategy. The study also showed that there is a significant improvement in dairy performance and it was recommended that dairy companies should understand that CRS is an inevitable urgent of marketing approach that can be considered as Critical Responsibility of Market with regard to Dairy companies in present context.