Ask your customer experience team whether loyalty matters, and you'll have an answer in seconds. Ask the finance committee to fund it, and the conversation gets harder. Customer experience competes for capital against initiatives that turn up with a defensible number attached, and it frequently loses.
There's a harder problem sitting underneath the funding one. Even when the money gets approved, most of it goes to the wrong journeys.
More than three years of NPS Prism data across Australian retail banking, covering 10+ banks and ~23,000 responses point to an allocation that runs against instinct: the journeys carrying the most loyalty are the ones nobody remembers having.
Everyday banking accounts for ~57% of journey-level impact on Relationship NPS. Sales & setup accounts for ~23%. Issue resolution accounts for ~20%.
Now read that against where the budget goes.
Issue resolution carries by far the greatest emotional weight of the three. A fraud alert or a failed login can change how a customer sees you that afternoon. It's the work that generates escalations, board questions, and war rooms. It's also the smallest of the three.
Everyday banking is the opposite. No single balance check carries much feeling. But when between 40% and 70% of your customers complete these journeys every month, volume does the work that intensity can't. Reliability beats rescue.
The idea that effort matters more than delight isn't new. What's new is the altitude. That argument has mostly been about where to handle a single service interaction. This is about where a bank puts its money across the whole portfolio of journeys, in one market, with the split measured rather than asserted.
Promoters don't just score you higher. They behave differently. In Australian retail banking, promoters refer 3.8× more often than detractors, are 1.5× more likely to make you their primary bank, and churn 22% less.
Behavior is only half the argument. The other half is what it's worth—and that's the number you need for the funding conversation.
At one large retail bank, a full-potential value case built on NPS Prism data sized each point of Relationship NPS at roughly 1% of annual profit, from referrals, share of wallet, and retention combined.
While the magnitude may be different at your bank, what travels is the method. The chain from experience to loyalty to profit can be built, sized, and defended in front of a committee that wants a number.
Relationship NPS comes from three places: brand, product, and journeys.
Brand accounts for ~20%, driven mostly by perceptions of innovation and value for money. Those perceptions shift over years, not quarters. Product accounts for ~15%, mostly transaction and savings accounts—and a competitive rate or a new feature helps until a competitor matches it.
Journeys account for ~65%. Here's the part worth sitting with: only about 12 points of that hits Relationship NPS directly. The rest arrives indirectly—roughly 38 points through product perception, and 16 through brand.
So when your customers tell you what they think of your product, much of what they're actually rating is how it feels to use it.
That should settle an argument you've probably had internally. Our product is competitive, so put the money into the complaints queue gets the mechanism backwards. Product perception sits downstream of everyday journey performance. Improve the balance check and you move the product score.
The figures above describe an industry. What it takes to win your customers depends on your own performance, and on the gap between you and whoever is beating you at each journey.
Three questions decide whether a journey is worth funding:
Answer all three at once, and the shortlist gets short quickly. That's the level we measure at: journey by journey, channel by channel, against the competitors you're actually losing customers to. You get the scorecard, the operational metrics sitting behind each score, and a simulation of the Relationship NPS gain from improving a given journey before you commit the spend.
One more cut matters. Journey-level averages hide channel. The same balance check can be excellent in your app and well behind the market in your call centre. The fix, the cost, and the owner are completely different in each.
See what a point of loyalty is worth at your bank—and which journey is costing you most.
Survey conducted in partnership with Dynata.
About Dynata
Dynata is the world’s largest first-party data company for insights, activation, and measurement. With a reach that encompasses millions of consumers and business professionals globally, and an extensive library of individual profile attributes collected through surveys, Dynata is the cornerstone for precise, trustworthy quality data. The company has built innovative data services and solutions around its robust first-party data offering to bring the voice of the customer to the entire marketing continuum — from uncovering insights to activating campaigns and measuring cross-channel marketing return on investment. Dynata serves more than 6,000 market research, media and advertising agencies, publishers, consulting and investment firms, and corporate customers in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.