More consumers make move to multi-banking
People struggle to find a bank that satisfies all their functional and service requirements
THE CORE BANKING products of current accounts, credit cards, home loans, personal loans, savings accounts and vehicle finance are largely undifferentiated across the banking sector, leading to consumers becoming increasingly “multi-banked” and less brand loyal as they struggle to find a bank that satisfies all their functional and service requirements across diverse product and servicing needs.
These are just some of the findings of the latest South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SA-csi) for Banking Products (2018) conducted by Consulta, which provides insights into the overall level of satisfaction of customers across various banking products.
The SA-csi for Banking Products follows the recently released overall banking customer satisfaction index, which showed that 2019 will be a year of fierce rivalry, as one in four customers were identified as ready to defect to another bank, with three new digital disruptor banks ready to capitalise on these soft targets.
“With the exception of Absa’s excellent customer satisfaction results on personal loans and Capitec’s continued market leadership by a big margin on transactional (current account) banking, all banks are struggling to differentiate their product offerings, which is evident in almost all banks using fees and costs related to their offerings as the key drivers of customer satisfaction levels. As soon as price becomes the key driver of customer satisfaction, banks have lost the ability to differentiate on product benefits. Customer experience and outstanding service then becomes critical,” says Professor Adré Schreuder, SA-csi founder and chairperson.
“With Gartner’s prediction that by 2020 most companies (89 percent) would differentiate predominantly on customer experience, banks are under huge pressure to get customer satisfaction and experience entrenched throughout their people, processes, technology platforms and channels. It’s a massive task given the long legacy of silos that exist within banks across different product divisions.
“Banks simply do not have a single view of their customer’s portfolios due to legacy infrastructure issues that are complex and very costly to resolve.
“New disruptor banks coming to the market have a distinct advantage; they don’t have to deal with the challenges created by outdated systems, technology or processes. They come with a model that has been purposefully built from the ‘outside in’ based on meeting customer needs, rather than forcing an operating model on to customers, because that’s the way the business has been structured,” says Schreuder.
See right and below for key takeouts from the SA-csi for Banking Products 2018.