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Financial services

In 2005 when CTMA conducted its first national customer experience baseline study amongst customers of New Zealand retail banks, the study provided strong evidence that many banks operate with a significantly compromised customer retention strategy. 

 

Many banks appear to operate with a significantly compromised customer retention strategy

 

 
 

Impact of poor service on customer retention

Banks invest heavily on campaigns to attract new customers, but keeping existing customers depends more than ever on service quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty.   Often, the hard work attracting and developing new customer relationships can be destroyed if that customer experiences a problem or concern that isn't quickly resolved.  This business risk often remains unseen because a traditional approach to measuring customer satisfaction often fails to show the impact of poor service on the bank’s profitability.

CTMA's national study estimated that the problems customers experience when banking, and the way many banks currently handle customer complaints, may be placing between 8% and 12% of their annual profits at risk.

The study presented participating banks with valuable insights into their relative strengths, and identified specific opportunities for improvement.

In subsequent annual updates, two disturbing paradoxes have been observed:

  • Although customers of some banks report fewer problems, overall satisfaction and advocacy appears to have dropped.

  • When problems do occur, there appears to be an increase in the percentage of customers contacting their bank for help, but a drop in satisfaction with the action taken by banks in response.
     

It appears that although most banks are attending to service quality improvements, customer expectations are increasing. And, when customers go to their banks for help, the problems are often not resolved to the customer's satisfaction.

Bank-specific client work

In addition to its industry-wide research into retail banking, CTMA provides a range of client-specific consulting and research services in the financial services industry that focus on improving service quality to build customer loyalty and advocacy.  They include:

  • Assistance with service quality and customer experience improvement programmes

 

  • Customer experience baseline studies - identifying:

    • Overall satisfaction with the banking experience

    • Sources of customer dissatisfaction

    • Customers' complaint behaviour

    • Bank's response effectiveness

    • Impact on loyalty and advocacy

 

  • Satisfaction tracking programmes - focussed on individual banking processes such as:

    • Application processes for home loans and credit cards

    • Complaints handling and issues resolution processes


 

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