Digital banking, customer experience and bank financial performance: UK customers’ perceptions

The purpose of this paper is to examine customers’ perceptions of digital banking (DB), customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty and financial performance (FP) in UK banks.

The research consists of a survey of UK bank customers’ perceptions of the above themes; use of banks’ financial reports to obtain FP ratios; multivariate factor analysis; structural equation modelling; and analysis of variance tests to explore research hypotheses on the relationships among the study factors.

The main factors which determine customer experience in DB are service quality, functional quality, perceived value (PV), employee-customer engagement, perceived usability and perceived risk. There is a significant relationship among customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty, which is related to FP.

This study concentrates on UK bank customers which limits its generalisability to other banks globally. However, the fact that banks typically adopt common standards in bank financial management implies that the findings are potentially robust for global bank management. Replicating the study in banks in other countries will further enhance this robustness.

Some significant effects of customer characteristics on the study factors were observed, which have useful implications for DB, bank marketing services and bank FP.

Unlike previous studies, this study uses both Net Promoter Score and financial ratios as dependent variables, to provide a combined study of the relationships among 14 study factors, with implications for bank marketing and FP.