Customer Loyalty: A case study of a local bank in Sweden

Abstract: Background: The financial services industry is a highly competitive and fragmented market. Firms are realizing the need and advantage of retaining customers rather than only focusing on acquiring new customers. Managers should focus on increasing customer satisfaction and communication levels as well as providing higher service quality. They should also emphasize the importance of building better relationships with customers to create loyalty. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate if customers of a local bank office are loyal, find the factors that create disloyalty and analyze how the bank can increase customer loyalty.  Method: To complete the purpose of this paper, the authors prepared a case study on a local Swedish bank and conducted a survey of the bank’s customers to determine levels of loyalty within the company. The authors spent four days in the bank office to have the customers fill in the survey immediately after their experience with the bank. Participants in the survey were customers who visited bank tellers, had booked meetings, or un-booked meetings. Conclusion: It was found that the bank had high levels of customer loyalty, as a majority of the customers were exclusively customers of the bank. Never the less a significant amount of customers had an additional bank(s) which shows the bank has an opportunity to strengthen their market position, but also a need to retain their customers. Customers were satisfied with the service quality provided and the relationships were satisfactory between customers and their advisers. The majority of the customers were contributing to a positive word of mouth, which is an indicator that they are loyal customers. However, the main area of improvement needed by the bank is to implement a better customer complaint management system, as many customers did not know how or where to complain.