Customer advocacy may be the greatest single indicator of institutional health, and what bank consumers hear from their customers may be more important than the ads they read, see or hear. Those are two of the findings of RKM Bank Advocate, a new research report authored by RKM Research and Communications, Inc., and powered by Global Market Insite, Inc.
The report indicates that emotion and self-esteem matter to a bank's bottom line and that the customer who feels the strongest positive emotions toward his or her primary financial institution keeps a significantly higher share-of-wallet at that bank than other customers.
For a bank with $1 billion in deposits, that emotional connection difference can translate into a difference of $20.2 million in deposits under management. This same slight difference in emotional value yields a difference of 1.2 positive statements, on average, from customers. For a bank with 200,000 customers, that translates into a difference of 240,000 positive buzz statements in the marketplace.