Abstract:

The study examined how customer engagement online could enhance customer satisfaction with bank services and encourage further patronage. With about 22 banks in Nigeria, there has been a major marketing drive by each bank to attract as many customers as possible. As the number of customers grows, however, the banks begin to encounter challenges relating to accommodating huge number of customers in the banking all as well as attending to their inquiries. Several banks have attempted to respond to these challenges by introducing online service platforms and encouraging their customers to embrace internet banking. Banks have also adopted the use of social media to communicate with their customers. It is, however, not sufficient for banks to see online platforms, particularly social media, as another means to push information at their customers. Social media creates a valuable opportunity for two-way communication in which the customers will feel like an active participant rather than as helpless recipient. This paper, therefore, examined the perception of the customers of the First Bank of Nigeria on how the bank has used online platforms for customer engagement. A sample size of 246 respondents was selected from five branches in the Festac Zone of First Bank, Lagos State. The Findings reveal that the respondents associated the speed of feedback online with their willingness to explore other service packages of the bank. A Spearman’s rank-order correlation result also shows that there is a strong and positive relationship between how quickly the bank responded to inquiries online and the respondents’ believe that their issues can be resolved. It was recommended that more efforts should be dedicated to building relationships with customers online and that official websites should be made more interactive.