A Theoretical Perspective of Contract and Contractual Customer-Supplier Relationship in the Mobile Phone Service Sector
Both contracts and contractual relationships as concepts have been rarely discussed from scholars’ perfectives in the Relationship Marketing (RM) branch of learning. Reviewing these concepts in the customer-service sector adds value because the majority of mobile service firms are losing their current contracted customers at a significant rate despite practicing different RM activities to retain active ones. Thus, this study introduces the concept of Contractual Customer Relationship Marketing (C-CRM) for the first time to the RM field of study and discusses how to employ Contractual Relationship Marketing (C-RM) especially in the use of contractual bonds to establish, maintain and extend customer-supplier relationships. This study targets various issues that are interrelated to the use of contracts to maintain and retain valuable customers in the mobile service sector. To explore these issues, this paper focuses on extending an understanding of contracts and their use in the contractual customer-supplier relationships. This requires an overview of the study’s topic in section one, with section two outlining the study’s importance. Section three provides an overview of the contract meaning and section four explaining the main benefits of using business contracts. Section five discusses the importance of using contracts for customer retention, then section six considers the contractual use in renewable situations, section seven reviews the relationship between contract use and customer switching, section eight explains how to employ contracts in prolonging customer-supplier relationships, and, finally, the concluding remarks are made in section nine.