ADMINISTRATION TOOLS: HOW ARE THEY APPLIED IN BUSINESS MANAGEMENT IN CUSTOMER LOYALTY?

Abstract

It is considered that the use of business management tools brings benefits to organizations in search of a competitive advantage. The objective is to analyze how administration tools are used in business management practices with the respective customer satisfaction and loyalty process. How methodology, it is considered an exploratory and quantitative study. As a study method, non-probabilistic sampling was considered through 107 interviews applied by Google Forms platform. The main findings show that 32.3% use advertising and promotions as strategies to attract new customers; 58.7% point to social networks as a way of contacting the customer and 65.4% usually assess customer satisfaction, and with that, only 29.6% have some form of loyalty card as a customer loyalty strategy. As for the tools for strategic management, despite low usage rates, 26.9% do SWOT analysis, 26.0% do business plan, 23.1% use the PDCA cycle, 22.1% use the 5W2H and 21.2% the CRM as the company's strategy. The study contributed by analyzing how companies do to satisfy and retain their customers, whether they use any management tool for this and what strategies are used in search of a lasting relationship, as well as evaluating the level of customer satisfaction with the products and/or services offered. And the most of the interviewed managers do not use management systems to attract and keep their customers, probably due to lack of knowledge or they consider this investment unfeasible, which points to a gap between the use of management tools and their  concepts.