Building customer advocacy: Growth opportunities for Brazilian retail banks

By better understanding customers' attitudes toward their institution and the impact customer perceptions have on profitability, Brazilian banks can discover new opportunities for driving growth, attracting new customers and improving customer retention. Identifying those customers who are Advocates, Apathetics or Antagonists can enable banks to more precisely target customer-focused initiatives, leverage their customers' potential value and improve the customer experience overall. In this paper, we detail the findings of our new survey of Brazilian banking customers, which we believe offers important insights into customer attitudes, and explores how banks can employ new tactics to improve customer advocacy within and across their customer-facing operations.

Attracting, developing and retaining valuable customers is at the top of nearly every retail bank's agenda. However, as our survey confirms, many institutions have yet to identify and deploy the right segment-based strategies, employee incentives, and process and technology improvements to pro-duce higher returns from their customer-focused initiatives. In recent years, banks have concentrated on making significant investments to improve back-office operations and scale their infrastructure to enhance their core capabilities. Today, those improvements – along with increasing information access, the accelerated growth of the Internet and positive economic developments – present numerous opportunities for banks to heighten the customer experience and grow their product portfolios.

In order to acquire more profitable customers and increase the value of the ones they have, bank ex-ecutives need to more fully understand customer attitudes and their impact on customer behavior. Customers who have a positive attitude toward their bank are Advocates, while those whose experi-ences shape negative opinions become Antagonists. Apathetics fall somewhere in the middle. Conse-quently, a bank's ability to effectively manage and influence customer attitudes becomes paramount to sustaining growth and profitability.

To read the full study, download the PDF files at the top of this page.