Influence of customer orientation on corporate social responsibilities in the Sri Lankan banking sector

Abstract

Customers expect value addition from their marketers. According to Narver and Slater (1990) organizations have to be customer oriented to ensure superior value to their customers. Thus customer orientation is the prime element of marketing concept, therefore market oriented business adopt company wide customer orientation. Narver and Slater (1990) defined customer orientation as "the sufficient understanding of one's target buyers to be able to create superior value for them continuously" (p. 21). Thus customer oriented marketer has to understand needs, wants, preferences, expectations, behavior, and perception etc of their customers. Meanwhile consumers are becoming socially conscious and they favour socially responsible business organizations. As a result customers have social expectations over their marketers; therefore it seems that customer orientation is influencing on socially responsible business behavior. But so far no research has been conducted to examine the influence of customer orientation on corporate social responsibilities in Sri Lankan banking sector. Therefore main purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of customer orientation on corporate social responsibilities in Sri Lankan banking sector. Hence findings of this study would be useful to the Sri Lankan banks to enhance socially responsible business behavior. This research was limited to the Sri Lankan banking sector which consists of commercial banks and specialized banks. Thus 22 commercial banks and 13 specialized banks were considered for this study. Researcher adopted quantitative methodology and used structured questionnaires for data collection. Multiple linear regression techniques were used for data analysis. Results showed that customer orientation significantly influences corporate social responsibilities, therefore, it can be concluded that an organization can enhance its corporate social responsibility by adopting customer oriented practices.