Capitec again outshines its competition by far, according to BrandsEye
CAPITEC Bank has come out trumps once more in the latest BrandsEye banking index.
Opinion mining company, BrandsEye, published their annual South African Sentiment Index for 2017 and partnered with Certified Customer Experience (CX) professional and expert, Julia Ahlfeldt, developer of the Net Experience Efffect, a barometer for the health of a brand’s customer experiences.
In order to rank the banks by sentiment and gauge public opinion, BrandsEye tracked 1 790 933 social media posts about the big five banks between September last year and August this year.
BrandsEye, to achieve high levels of accuracy, distributed a significant sample of the total posts to a proprietary crowd of vetted and trained local language speakers and each post was coded and verified by crowd members who assessed the sentiment of the post.
JP Kloppers, the chief executive of BrandsEye, said yesterday that the unsolicited nature of social media makes platforms like Facebook and Twitter ideal sources to gauge public opinion.
“Our AI system learns from how our crowd processes data to better serve the crowd with relevant information. If your’e using only algorithms to understand how people feel, you’re probably getting the wrong answers.”
The index also integrated BrandsEye’s topics data from July with Ahlfeldt’s elements of the CX model, which ranks a business’s performance based on its value proposition, ease of use, resolution and promise delivery, to uncover the drivers of customer feedback and why South African consumers prefer one bank over the others.
Reviewing BrandsEye topics and sentiment data for July, Capitec scored +34.9 percent, while Nedbank scored +1.2 percent for value proposition.
All banks performed poorly on ease of use, averaging a net sentiment of -74.7 percent, the lowest individual score was Nedbank, -83.4 percent and highest FNB, -55.6 percent.
Resolution of issues was also as pain point, with an average score of -56.6 percent, where Nedbank customers highlighted this as a concern, while they did not generate positive sentiment for this category.
Capitec outperformed others in the industry, with a -29.1 percent net sentiment for topics within the CX element.
Promise-delivery was the second most talked about CX element and faired only slightly higher than issues regarding resolution scoring -51.3 percent.
Chris Moerdyk, a marketing adviser and analyst, said data such as the index done by BrandsEye was going to be something of the future, but the problem with it was that it is very difficult to get accuracy when asking peoples’ opinion or asking them to give you answers.
“People often give you the answer you are wanting to hear rather than what they feel.
“The thing that BrandsEye is doing this work through social media is significant. They are giving the reaction of people that have been presented in all honesty.
“So that is brilliant and it is going to be the thing of the future.”
Moerdyk said a lot of companies in South Africa still do not understand or recognise the incredible value of online data and a lot of firms still felt that social media was for teenagers.
However, he said social media had become a critical business tool and a lot of companies had staff who monitored social media sites to check on what consumer were actually talking about and when they do speak about their particular company they can intervene.
Moerdyk said it was not rocket science, but a situation where companies were now able to listen and see that consumers were talking to each other by “eavesdropping” on consumers.
He said for years, consumer had not taken a liking to banks and it was no surprise that Capitec Bank had come out on top as a new player in the market, by supplying a customer service that kept things simple, kept their overheads low and their prices down.
joseph.booysen@inl.co.za