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1. Introduction
E-commerce development has prompted the need to provide seamless marketing experiences across various digital channels to achieve business success; however, many companies have not tied their customer experience investments to business outcomes (Izogo and Jayawardhena, 2018). Competition has motivated banks to embrace digital banking (DB) channels (e.g. telephone, internet and mobile banking) for offering services to customers (Alalwan et al., 2016). These channels have become important in financial services and are challenging traditional banking methods. DB has significant implications for banks’ marketing efforts, in delivering interactive services because it impacts customer interfaces. It has enabled banks to offer multi-channel services, altering the way they interact with customers (Payne et al., 2017) and made the UK banks close branches as customer numbers dwindle (BBC, 2016; Stone and Laughlin, 2016). This move towards DB poses a challenge for banks on customer acquisition, retention and profitability, which are no longer determined solely in branches. Although DB has developed unprecedentedly and is ubiquitous among mainstream banks, there is still a need to understand the impact on customer experience and bank financial performance, especially from the managers’ perspectives, who implement DB, hence the importance of this paper.
Customers are increasingly more demanding, forcing firms to become customer-oriented and invest to offer quality services and enhance performance (Pekovic and Rolland, 2016) and increase branding (Fritz et al., 2017). DB has enabled banks to delight customers with instant services through different distribution channels (Tam and Oliveira, 2017). Most research in this area predominantly studies customers, which can be a drawback. However, bank employees who frequently interact with customers are the most important link in service delivery, building trust and influencing customer behaviour (Karatepe and Aga, 2016). Given that managers are responsible for implementing DB services, capturing their opinion through their reaction and interaction with customers is also critical to understanding customer experience and financial performance impact.
There have been studies that capture gaps between managers’ perceptions and customers’ service expectations in the leisure sector (Luk and Layton, 2002). Similarly, Julien and Tsoni (2013) study banking staff and customer perceptions focussing on identifying perception-based gaps and improving the service quality co-production. The above literature justifies the managers’ perception relevance on how customer experience and financial performance are affected...