Abstract
The growing competition in the banking industry has made it necessary for financial institutions to adopt strategies that enhance customer satisfaction and ensure long-term profitability. Relationship marketing has emerged as a key approach that focuses on building and maintaining strong relationships with customers through trust, communication, commitment, and effective service delivery. Despite this, many banks still face challenges in retaining customers and sustaining profitability due to weak relationshipmanagement practices. This study examined the impact of relationship marketing on customer satisfaction and profitability, using Access Bank Plc, Lagos Mainland Branch, as a case study. It specifically sought to determine the effect of relationship marketing on customer satisfaction and to evaluate how satisfaction influences profitability. A conceptual framework was developed linking relationship-marketing dimensions (trust, communication, commitment, and empathy) to customer satisfaction and profitability outcomes. A descriptive survey design was adopted, and primary data were collected through structured questionnaires administered to 100 customers using simple random sampling, with 80 valid responses analyzed. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the chi-square test of independence. The findings revealed that relationship marketing significantly improves customer satisfaction. Another is that customer satisfaction significantly affects profitability, and relationship-marketing tools significantly influence customer retention. The study concluded that relationship marketing is essential for enhancing both customer satisfaction and profitability in the banking sector, and recommended that Access Bank strengthen communication, improve service quality, and adopt more effective customerrelationship-management strategies to sustain long-term customer relationships.
Keywords: Relationship marketing, customer satisfaction, customer retention, profitability, banking sector.
Author name(s):
Ozioma Benson
Company: Renmoney Microfinance Bank, Lagos Department of Marketing
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23150329
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.