Loyalty/reward programmes : are they the most influential strategic solution for client retention?

The biggest challenge facing organizations in service industry today is that ofcustomer retention. Loyalty/reward programmes have been promoted as theultimate strategic solution towards customer retention by some industry experts,while the others question its influential potential as a customer retention strategy.The primary purpose of this research was to establish whether loyalty/rewardprogrammes, as one of the main contributing Customer RelationshipManagement (CRM) factors, are either simply a fad or actually a fab solution!Subsequently, the research focused on the evaluation of the three most notedand influential CRM components in current literature and concluded that servicequality and customer contact rated higher than loyalty/reward programmes withwhat should be considered the ultimate critic, namely the customer, or rather 60of them.