Bank Customers More Sensitive to Experience than Rates, Transaction Costs-KPMG Survey
Bank customers are less sensitive to charges and costs when selecting a channel to access services from, but would pay an arm and a leg for good experience, the 2024 KPMG Kenya Banking Industry Customer Experience Survey has found.
Customer experience ranks highest (47 per cent) among the reasons given by customers for selection of a preferred channel, charges/rates rank lowest at 6 per cent for reasons for preference of specific channels.The research indicates that majority of the banked population are between 26-35 years of age, and the main services they access include savings account, mobile banking, current account, cash deposit/ withdrawal from branch teller and cash deposit/ withdrawal from bank agent.42 per cent of the respondents interacted with their primary bank via mobile app, 24 per cent visited a branch, 14 per cent were served by an agent while 11 per cent accessed the ATM.“This implies that customers’ sensitivity to charges and costs is low, and they rank customer experience over and above the cost it takes to access services via a given channel. For banks in Kenya, excellent customer experience should be a key focus of the service offering. Banks need to have a well-articulated customer experience strategy to facilitate a blueprint in offering quality customer experience to customers,” KPMG say in the survey report.
The main transaction types include withdrawals 50 per cent, deposits 34 per cent, funds transfer 5 per cent with requests for bank statements is at 3 per cent.
Majority of the customers have interacted with the bank in the last 1 month, with 33 per cent having interacted with the bank less than a week before the survey. This underscores how critical the bank services are especially for withdrawal and deposits. In terms of channel preference, majority (42 per cent) of the banked population used mobile app as their preferred channel to interact with the bank, with bank branch ranking second at 24 per cent and the least preferred option being internet banking at 4 per cent.
The report looks at the current customer trends across the Kenyan market and its effects on a bank’s revenue. A total of 886 customers were interviewed in the Nairobi, Coast and Western regions. It analyzed the Kenyan banking customer based on the characteristics that drive behavior and expectations, ways they direct attention and focus, how they connect to devices, information and each other, how they balance the constraints of time and how that changes across life events, how they adjust the share of wallet across life events.
“For Kenyan customers, basic needs form a big part of the expenditure of the Kenyan households. The top three expenditure items including food (17.71 per cent), housing/ rent (17.21 per cent), education (11.54 per cent),” KPMG notes in the survey.
“While most of the income of the banked population is spent on rent and food, respondents expressed a desire to buy land as their long-term goal. From the respondents of the survey 13.84 per cent desire to buy land, this desire is matched by the higher expenses that customers are spending on rent.”
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