Switching banks: Old bank gone but not forgotten

Abstract

Losing customers to another bank tends to worry bank executives. Understanding the reasons why customers switch banks helps these executives plan their customer retention (including customer recovery) and customer acquisition strategies. This paper improves our understanding of switching by applying a categorisation of switching behaviour observed in repertoire markets to subscription markets. This allows us to make predictions about the content of customers' post-switch brand repertoires, or consideration sets. We test our predictions with a large commercial data set and find that switching antecedents pertaining to utility maximisation (‘moving for a better offer’) and expectation disconfirmation (usually service failures) confirm previous research findings. We, however, make the new discovery that stochastic reasons (those beyond the bank's control) account for a considerable amount of switching and lead to greater post-switch consideration. Our study shows that construction of customers' post-switch consideration sets is therefore antecedent specific, and concludes that while the previous main bank brand may have been forsaken, it is certainly not forgotten. Enough goodwill for the previous main bank brand resides in these results to warrant bank executives reconsidering their customer-recapture strategies.