5.1 Conclusion
Guarantee Trust Bank has been in the banking industry in Nigeria since 1990. Today, the bank faces competition from other commercial banks as well as micro finance institutions. The bank has implemented initiatives to ensure that its services cut across the demands in the market in order to attract new customers and retain existing customers. All customer retention processes used by the banking sector and other industries are present in Guarantee Trust Bank. From the study the commonly used processes are solving the problem and training employees. Solving the problem is seen as the best process since it ensures that the complaint is resolved and builds the customer confidence. Training the staff on customer service skills and other life skills ensure that the staff is capable of handling customer enquiries at every customer touch point. Majority of the staff are aware of customer retention which is an evident that the bank is keen on customer retention.
Though some of the staff does not agree that the Guarantee Trust Bank customer retention is effective, the analysis show that the staff believes that most of the customers are satisfied with GTB services and this means that there is still room for improvement. This alloyed with the routine baseline surveys done by the bank on customer retention and customer satisfaction will go a long way in achieving effective customer retention.
From the literature review, the reasons why organizations do customer retention are evident from the Guarantee Trust Bank study. For Guarantee Trust Bank, the main reasons why the bank does customer retention to influence customers’ future attitude and behavior and to identify service failure points. When customers create a post attitude towards the bank products and services, they would be able to get more of the products and services as well as introducing their friends to the bank. This in turn contributes to a positive financial performance of the bank. Hence, this study concludes that customer retention has a positive impact on the institutions profitability.
5.2 Recommendation
The study has realized the impact of customer retention on business performance. Guarantee Trust Bank has put in place a platform for ensuring that customers get a plus one service. In 2010, the bank introduced the Guarantee Trust Bank Contact centre (GT connect centre) to handle customer queries and complaints.
For effective future customer retention processes, this study calls for Guarantee Trust Bank to do a pre-operative assessment, planning and preparation of all initiatives as well as centralize system on customer complaints. In addition, the bank will have to ensure that customers fully understand the bank processes and have timely updates and responses to customers to build customer trust and improve service guarantee. Lastly the study recommends that the management should always pay attention to employee feedbacks on complaint resolutions and the way forward and restructure the flexibility of bank processes to reduce bureaucracy.
