In recent times, managers have started understanding the relevance of retaining active customers with companies as a key component guarantying their survival in the market. Moreover, the benefits associated with companies counting on loyal customers have been highlighted. This loyalty emerges from the relationship “customerorganization”, the longer and more intense the relationship is, the higher the benefits. The aim of this paper is to emphasizes the importance of relationship marketing management in Albanian insurance businesses.
Insurance market activity, both as a financial intermediary and as a provider of risk transfer and indemnification, promotes economic growth by allowing different risks to be managed more efficiently.
This activity would encourage the accumulation of new capital and mobilize domestic savings into productive investments. Arena (2008), found that a robust causal relationship exists between insurance market activities and economic growth. The marketing concept emerged in the mid–1950s. Instead of a product–centered, ‘make–and–sell’ philosophy the business shifted to a customer–centered, “sense–and–respond” philosophy. The job is not to find the right customers for your products, but to find the right products for the customers (Kotler and Keller, 2008).
The American Marketing Association, defined marketing as “An organizational function and set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders”. Marketing management is the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers by creating,delivering, and communicating superior customer value.Marketing is a societal process by which individuals and groups obtain what they need and through creating, offering, and freely exchanging products and services of value with others. Holistic marketing approach recognizes that ‘everything matters’ in marketing. It has four components i.e., Relationship marketing, Integrated marketing, Internal marketing and Performance marketing (Kotler and Keller 2008). McCarthy (2002) classified marketing activities as marketing mix tools of four broad kinds which he called four Ps of marketing: viz., product, price, place and promotion usually applied to marketing of tangible goods.
However to capture the distinctive nature of service performances three more elements associated with service delivery are considered physical environment, process, and people (Lovelock and Wirtz 2004). Thus, for effective marketing strategies of services all the seven P’s (product, price, place,promotion, physical environment, process and people) play an important role.
Customer relationship management is an issue that every company, large or small must take in some way. Handled well, a CRM strategy can deliver significant benefits for companies and customers.There are relevant indications that tactically applied relationship marketing strategies provide a
viable solution to insurance companies in competitive distress. Managed in the right way, the adoption of the relationship management theories treated in this report have every chance of being a key factor contributing to success, and even to survival, in the years to come for insurance businesses in Albania.The competition in the insurance markets will most certainly continue to intensify: banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions will keep on merging, cross-selling services and erasing the borders between the respective fields of financial services. The financial markets of the 21st century may be markets where there are no longer anything called “insurance companies” or “banks,” but only more idely encompassing financial services organizations. This development gives cause for launching every
action possible to retain and deepen profitable customer relationships in order to survive the battle for market share. The customers are, and have always been, the perhaps obvious, but still vital, key to holding a favorable position in the market, and to do so at a profit. “The customer is king” is a well-known phrase in marketing. However, following this reasoning relationship management is the indispensable queen, which requires the deepest respect and a strong and well-elaborated sense of strategy.
