University of East London

Today, with the increased competition within the financial services industry the banks can no longer only rely on the traditional techniques of attracting and retaining the base of customers. If the customers find that the banks are not giving them total quality and satisfactions, they will switch to another bank that can provide better personalized services. And this will cause great loss to the bank because the cost of attracting new customers is much higher than the cost of retaining its existing clientele. Therefore, the evaluation of the Internet as a relationship marketing tool, which is the main theme for the research, will be of utmost importance to better understand the customers' online needs in an effort to increase customer satisfaction, leading to better bank-customer relationship and reduced defection rates.

It is clearly evident that many banks are already jumping on the bandwagon of relationship marketing via the Internet which has enormous potential towards increasing annual revenues, all these made possible by the existing technologies to transact with its customer base. However, it is also apparent that not every bank customer would favor relationship marketing via the Internet as most consumers prefer not to have meaningful relationships with the bank that desires to provide personalized services to them. Therefore even though the Internet technology has proven to become a powerful tool toward improving relations and retaining customers, this technology still, has yet to be exploited in an organized, efficient and valuable way to smooth the progress of relationship marketing via the Internet.

Therefore it is very important for me to research this area of interest from the consumers' view because they dictate how the whole transaction is done and whether the Internet banking have actually attracted them; whether it is appropriate and fruitful in the on-line interactive environment. What makes customers stay in a relationship would also be an area of research. To explore further the present study also intends to find out customers' perceptions towards the suitability of online banking practices and services; whether it can be seen as a tool to strengthen the bond of customer-bank relationship.