Customer loyalty program based on quality function deployment with fuzzy linguistic preference relation

The competition among shopping malls is getting increasingly more intense. In order to enhance corporate competitiveness and profitability, how to retain key loyal customers has become an important issue for the managers of shopping malls. Customer loyalty programs are a universal practice. This study proposes an analytical model for developing the strategic management of customer loyalty programs. Based on quality function deployment, our model constructs a fuzzy relational matrix to integrate the customer benefits and the customer loyalty programs. The results contribute to a better understanding of the different importance of customer benefits with respect to “Utilitarian benefits”, “Hedonic benefits” and “Symbolic benefits”. The study’s findings provide prioritized customer loyalty programs, including “Newest information transmissions,” “Communication service specialists,” “Exclusive free gift promotions,” and “VIP lounge service,” which can be used to determine the directions for the improvement of shopping malls. The study has implications for the theory and practitioners. First, it allows the integration of customer benefits in customer loyalty programs and the consideration of VIP customers in the programs. Second, the requirement evaluation considering fuzzy linguistic preferences allows for prioritizing the customer loyalty programs when dealing with uncertainty and vagueness. Finally, this approach helps to obtain more realistic results by integrating fuzzy decision-making into QFD.