Towards a customer engagement framework to enhance organisational change communication and customer satisfaction at Absa bank in the greater Durban area.

Abstract

Events that have unfolded in the past decade — the ease of new entrants into the banking sector, uncertain economic outlook, the 2008 global financial crisis, competition within the South African banking sector, have changed the banking sector in South Africa. Retail banks are under tremendous pressure to realign their business models to meet these challenges and changes. Conforming to the mounting pressure in the South African banking sector, Barclays bank PLC a major shareholder in Barclays Africa Group announced its departure from Barclays Africa Group. A move that will make Barclays Africa Group lose its strategic partner with over 100 years of experience working in Africa. The departure was received mixed reactions in the banking sector including Absa customers. In the South African banking sector context with reference to Absa bank, research on customer engagement is still in its infancy and a model that can be adopted during organisational change did not exist. To address this research gap, this study developed a customer engagement framework that is linked to organisational change communication and customer satisfaction. The research design adopted was the quantitative paradigm with a pre-coded structured closed ended questionnaire comprising the 5 Point Likert Scale that was used to administer the instrument to the selected sample respondents. The questionnaire comprised of 4 Sections, each under a specific main theme. The target population comprised of 650 000 Absa bank customers in the greater Durban area. Sekaran statistical table was used to for the sample selection. The sample of 384 customers was selected using convenience sampling a non-probability sampling technique. The analysis of the data involved the use of robust parametric and non-parametric tests for the empirical analyses using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25 for Windows. A variety of non-parametric tests were also used to test hypotheses formulated for the various sections and components of the study. Some significant findings emerged from the comprehensive statistical analyses which were also corroborated by national and international studies conducted by various researchers who also showed their concordance or discordance with the current findings and were referenced accordingly.