Policyholder perception on customer orientation of Insurance agent and customer loyalty with reference to Life Insurance companies in Anuradhpura District

Abstract

One reason of switching behavior is the low customer orientation service and therefore sector considered insurance Agent as a vital factor. Without considering positive actions taken by the life insurance industry, there is little existing research that evaluates individual perceptions of the service rendered by life insurance providers. Further to that customer attrition is an increasingly pressing issue faced by many insurance providers today (Goonetilleke & Caldera, 2013) and few researchers has identified customer-orientated culture leads to excellent customer services (Kassim, & Fong, 2012). Few empirical studies have addressed the impact of customer orientation of service employee on firm’s success (Brown et al., 2002). Customers rely on the behavior of service employees when evaluating quality of services (Thurau, 2004). Customer loyalty has been found in the literature to be a competitive tool for many companies customer loyalty is to determine the level of customer service through service quality assessment. Cited by Whereas Ruyter et al., (1998); Boulding et al., (1993) and Brady and Cronin (2001) found that high degree of service quality translates into loyalty. According to Aydin and Ozer (2005) and Cronin and Taylor (1992) are of a contrary opinion. They are of the view that service quality is a necessary but not sufficient condition to obtain customer loyalty. In previous researches there are contradictory arguments. According to Henning and Thurau, (2004) customer orientation of service employee is affected an employee’s technical skills, employee’s social skills his or her motivation to serve customer and his or herself perceived decision–making authority. My research objectives are to identify the relationship of the Customer Orientation that influence to the Loyalty of policyholder’s in the Life insurance, to determine the impact of the Customer Orientation service employee dimensions on Customer Loyalty in the Life insurance industry and to determine the most and least important customer Orientation service employee dimension factors that influence to the Customer Loyalty in the Life insurance industry. Employee’s technical skills, employee’s social skills his or her motivation to serve customer and his or herself perceived decision–making authority dimensions are use in this research.

Methodology

Researcher considered the policy holder s ’perception of customer orientation of insurance agent and the customer loyalty of life insurance industry in Anuradhapura district. Therefore four life insurance companies was selected in Thabuthegama regional area to carrying out the research study .Since this research is focused on life insurance customers’ Loyalty and Customer Orientation insurance agent, life insurance policyholder can be identified as unit of analyses and sample technique use simple random sample method.

Both descriptive and inferential techniques were used to analyze data. Descriptive statistics were used to discover and summarize the attributed of the sample. Furthermore, correlation coefficient analysis was used to measure the degree of linear association between two variables. Multiple regression analysis was used to combine contribution of each parts of the independent variable.