In July 2006, East & Partners launched its Business Banking Sentiment Index, a survey of overall business customer sentiment toward their banks. This was measured through a group of metrics including customer satisfaction, loyalty, advocacy, and empathy, which together provided a powerful prediction tool.

During, and as a result, of the Global Financial Crisis the business banking customer significantly altered. As a result predictive measures such as customer satisfaction have become increasingly disconnected from customer engagement and buying behaviour and no longer have actionable predictive power of future changes in output measures such as market share, share of customer wallet and cross sell performance.

In line with East research findings released in several advisory and research notes to clients during 2010, we have added significant new core content to this program measuring customer advocacy of their business banks.

Advocacy has become a more valuable view of likely customer engagement with their banks, especially in combination with other existing East measures of customer-bank empathy, bank loyalty experiences, contact frequency, proactiveness of bank engagement, mind share and advertising recognition.

The East & Partners Business Banking Advocacy Monitor is a bi-monthly Index of business customer advocacy and sentiment towards banks, based on interviews conducted Australia-wide with a structured sample of +/- 775 companies turning over A$1 to 100 million per annum, some 4,650 direct interviews with business banking customers annually. The Index provides a monitor of several key drivers of customer engagement behaviour with their banks including advocacy, detraction, empathy, satisfaction, loyalty and mind share.

This Index is a stand-alone initiative and is not related to East's other research programs.

Monitor Methodology

This month, the East & Partners research team conducted telephone interviews with a structured and representative sample of 788 businesses nationally, comprising:

 Report Overview  |  Released: Bi Monthly