Customer retention in retail financial services: an employee perspective

This paper reports the findings of a survey of staff perceptions on how customers are being retained in two traditional financial service retailers. In spite of a frequent acknowledgement that customer retention (CR) is a critical business objective, there is limited literature on how customers are actually being retained by organisations. A theoretical framework of managing customer retention is developed to form the basis for a 34‐item questionnaire, which was administered to two independent probability samples of staff working in two large retail financial service retailers. The study finds that these financial service retailers are aiming to retain customers through building relationships but that systems, strategies and structures may reflect transactional exchange.