Changing Preferences of Indian Customers’ towards combinations of services offered through Credit Cards: A Conjoint Analysis

Goals: Increasing competition and growing risks are major challenges. In a fiercely competitive industry, credit card issuers need to develop a loyal customer base and motivate their card holders to use their cards at a sufficient level to assure profitability. Objectives: The objectives of this article is to know the weightage given by the customer to the different attributes of the credit cards and to design a consumer model of credit card to retain customer loyalty.Results: It is a convenience sample of several cities and metros which shares almost major characteristics of Indian consumers. This study has identified four schemes like Medi-claim facility (M, Assigned Value-1), Insurance facility (I, Assigned Value-2), Discounts facility for purchases (D, Assigned Value-3) and Wide Acceptance in different sectors (W, Assigned Value-4) as independent variables that provides stability and sustainability to the firm-customer relationship. The loyalty model of customer has developed through the conjoint analysis by taking the utilities of different service factors associated with the credit cards. The highest service factor score was 25.891 and 20.274 at the different timings of (2002-05) and (2006-09) respectively. Conclusions: In order to develop sustainable relationships, marketers of credit cards should leverage involvement in their customers by employing strategies such as branding, positioning, and attractive and flexible service benefits to retain the customer loyalty. Further, credit card customers have an affinity towards high service quality with an affordable cost, therefore making value a prime consideration for achieving loyalty.