Keeping valuable customers is the major mission of every firm. To identify valuable customers, many firms have focused on their customer's financial contribution. Financial contribution pattern tells a lot about customers except for their willingness to be the firm's long-term business partners, not just wayfarers.
In this study, to identify customer's willingness of partnership, customer's relationship orientation is proposed. Customer's relationship orientation composed of their relationship attitude and relationship behavior with a firm. Relationship oriented customers keep longer relationship with the firm and contribute more on profit than transaction oriented ones.
For the membership organizations, relationship oriented customers are the base of business. On-line game is a kind of membership organization in the cyber world. The attitude and behavior of on-line garners in the game environment tells us their relationship orientation with the on-line game and game service firm.
In On-line game business, Customer's relationship attitude includes satisfaction, member-interdependence, commitment, identification and customer's relationship behavior includes participation, leadership, referral and suggestion. Through the customer survey, the following results are found. Customers who feel more interdependent with other members and identify themselves with the game environment participate more in the game community and show stronger leadership. They also recommend to others to play the game and give more feedback to enhance game contents and service environment.
By the customer's relationship attitude and behavior, four types of loyalty - true, spurious, latent, no loyalty - can be measured. To improve on-line game customer's loyalty and value, firms should understand the customer's loyalty type and design marketing plans according to the loyalty types. To enhance on-line game customer's relationship orientation, It is important to give more attention to keeping core product / service quality, enhancement of member interactions and rewards for customer's relationship contribution.
