The influence of advisors, advisor-customer relationships, and the financial crisis on satisfaction and retention of retail banking customers

For retail banks, as for other continuous service providers, CRM literature has focused on retention as the goal, given the higher profitability of customers who stay with the firm, when compared to newly attracted customers. Research has found a multitude of reasons for customers to stay with their firm, ranging from social effects to customers' age and socioeconomic status. Of the different reasons, customer satisfaction with the service provided has been identified as one of the strongest for customers to stay with the firm or to leave it. For retail banks, satisfaction can be segmented in a set of factors, including relational quality. Relational quality is of particular interest to retail banks, as they can use the relationship between their bank advisors and customers to deter defection and differentiate themselves from their competitors. Usually relational quality is conveyed through interactions between bank advisors and their customers. This relationship is of particular interest in retail banking service interactions. These interactions include, for example, investment decisions, which are executed under increased uncertainty following the onset of the financial crisis and euro-crisis. From the customer perspective there are also a number of reasons to rely on advice, including lack of financial literacy, behavioral biases and the cost of information seeking. Despite an apparent compatibility of interests between retail banks and customers, public and political opinion has seemingly stigmatized bank advice as a way for banks to extract rents from their customers. Regulators reacted to this with more regulation, such as the MiFID II (Markets in Financial Instruments Directive) accords in the EU and mandatory „Beratungsprotokoll“ in Germany. Our goal is to assess advice and customer reaction by viewing it from three perspectives: Is the relationship between advisor and customer so strong that severing of this relationship has negative repercussions on the customer-bank relationship? How do advisors interact with their customers: Do they pursue their own, subjective style, or a bank-wide style? How does the financial crisis influence the satisfaction and purchase intention of customers?