Introduction
The following article is the first instalment of excerpts from KPMG’s 2024 West Africa Banking Industry Survey Report, highlighting banking customer behavior and expectations across retail, corporate, and SME industry segments. While the survey was conducted across 16 regions in Ghana and 36 cities in Nigeria, the following highlights shed light on insights drawn from Ghanaian banking customers. Customer satisfaction is determined according to KPMG’s Six Pillars of Customer Experience: Integrity, Empathy, Resolution, Time and Effort, Personalisation, and Expectations.
State of Play
In recent years, Ghana's banking sector has steadily evolved, driven by efforts to align with shifting customer expectations. This year, incremental gains were observed across all three banking segments, marking a positive shift following last year's performance dip, which spared only the retail segment.
The SME segment emerged as the leader in overall customer ratings, displacing the Corporate segment, which topped performance last year. The SME segment also recorded the most significant increment – an uptick of about five percentage points, while the Corporate segment experienced marginal growth, increasing by approximately one percentage point. This shift signals a growing focus on addressing the unique needs of SME customers, a segment often considered underserved yet crucial to economic growth.
A deeper analysis identified Personalisation as the weakest-performing pillar across all customer segments, replacing Resolution, which held this position in the previous year. While there were modest improvements in Personalisation scores for both retail and corporate customers compared to last year, satisfaction with this pillar remains low. This suggests that customers may perceive ostensibly personalised services as generic or mass-delivered, diminishing their sense of exclusivity – a phenomenon often referred to as the personalisation paradox.
Empathy ranked highest for retail and corporate customers and second for SMEs, highlighting its growing role in trust and satisfaction. Customers closely associate empathy with staff professionalism, a top five priority across all segments for the second year, reinforcing the need for human-centred banking experiences.
On the other hand, Resolution improved across the industry, especially for retail and SME customers, reflecting progress in addressing complaints and service issues. For SMEs, POS-related support stood out as a key area of improvement from last year.
In retail banking, the boost in Resolution scores was driven by better call centre professionalism and communication skills, shorter wait times and faster response to social media queries. These advancements reflect banks’ efforts to streamline customer support touchpoints amid increasing demand for efficiency and responsiveness. Interestingly, despite improvements in the Resolution pillar and higher satisfaction levels compared to last year, overall industry rankings have declined. This suggests that many banks have embarked on improvement journeys, raised overall industry standards and inadvertently increased customers’ expectations of their banks.
This year’s leaders featured a mix of comeback leaders and steady improvers. Competition within the banking sector was intense, with corporate banking showing only an estimated four-percentage-point difference between the highest and lowest-rated banks. Meanwhile, leaders for the retail sector remained dynamic, with no single bank consistently leading the pack, as evidenced by fluctuations in rankings over previous years. This trend emphasises the importance of consistent improvement for banks aiming to remain relevant and successful in today’s banking industry.
Efficiency in everyday banking remains a key driver of customer satisfaction for retail customers. Topmost of these measures include ease of transferring money between account and mobile wallet and cash availability at ATMs. These measures not only ranked high in importance but also showed strong satisfaction scores, emphasising the critical role of seamless, reliable day-to-day banking services for individuals. For retail customers, efficiency and ease in routine transactions are foundational to their satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, satisfaction levels within this group remain robust, as the important measures closely align with the satisfaction scores. This alignment highlights that banks are effectively addressing core customer needs and focusing on areas that matter most during these challenging times.
The rankings for this segment saw Standard Chartered Bank secure the top position, followed closely by Stanbic Bank and then Zenith Bank - the latter two having featured in the top ten performers in previous years. CalBank demonstrated consistent performance, maintaining sustained presence in the top five performers; the only bank to have done so in the past three years.
Prudential Bank was the best performer for SME banking, outperforming last year’s leader by a significant six-percentage point margin. The bank excelled in quality, relevance and timeliness of obtaining bank information, ease and speed of obtaining cheque books and trade finance services.
GTBank and CalBank came in second and third place respectively; the latter led the rankings last year. GTBank was the new entrant for this segment, trailing the best performer by about three percentage points.
Generally, corporate clients placed a strong focus on transaction security, ease and timeliness of loan approval and disbursement, professionalism and attitude of relationship managers. However, loan approval timelines received the lowest satisfaction scores, reflecting widespread dissatisfaction amid current economic pressures where quick credit access remains crucial. This highlights a gap in meeting corporate clients’ expectations for efficiency, despite progress in other areas.
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