The growth of digitalization in banking : A study about customer loyalty

Abstract The banking industry has during later years gone through several technological changes (Svenska Bankföreningen 2014). These big changes have led to several advantages seen both from a customer – and corporate point of view. Advantages in easier usage, increased availability and more competition have made the banks more cost effective at the same time as the customer is being offered better prices. Even though the advantages seem to weigh over the disadvantages there are still those who thinks that things where “better in the past”. Worries about safety, an almost nonexistent cash handling business and a constant decrease in the physical presence can be a contributing factor to customers that are being left unhappy with the service and start looking around for better options. Banking through the Internet has today become such an obvious service that the thought about having to go back to the traditional way of banking for many people no longer feels like an option, which leads to the thought about how we ever got along without it in the first place (Young 2014). When the customer today is reaching a higher level of knowledge and awareness in an industry highly affected by competition it makes it important for the bank to be competitive in their services so that the customer will not switch bank. This has led to more banks investing a lot of resources to keep their customers loyal (Konkurrensverket, 2012). Because loyalty according to studies has shown to be profitable for the banks we have in this thesis chosen to investigate how banks in today’s industry increasingly affected by digitalization, higher competition and growing self-service opportunities is working with customer loyalty(Reichheld & Teal 2001), (Köksal & Dema 2014). We will study how they handle the growing distance between the customer and the bank, how the value customer loyalty and what tools they use to get loyal customer. The study is executed through a corporate point of view through semi-structured deep-interviews with staff both in manager and frontline positions of four strategically chosen banks, to investigate if the opinions and work against loyal customer either correspond or differ between the banks and the people who work there