Title: Millennials, COVID-19, and its impact on perception: the case of the banking system

Authors: Marwan Azouri; Sylvain Senechal

Addresses: Notre Dame University, XJ28+73C, Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon ' MCF, Toulouse Business School, 20 Bd Lascrosses, 31000 Toulouse, France

Abstract: Customer loyalty strategies of retailing banks are facing growing uncertainty among Millennials, with high attrition rates after only a few years. Besides, the COVID-19 pandemic and its social and economic consequences are severely hitting Millennials, and the retail banking sector seems to be frontline with people in turbulent times. In this paper we analyse the antecedents of customer loyalty intentions and switching intentions of people aged 18-25 towards their banks, using the same model before the crisis and 15 months after the beginning of the crisis. The studies are validated and compared using PLS-SEM, and show that trust and commitment still play a mediating role between classic antecedents and simple loyalty intentions. However, the influence of trust, commitment and loyalty intentions to limit switching intentions is fading through time, as if the COVID crisis contributed to an accelerated deterioration in the structure of usual relationships between constructs linked to loyalty. The explosion of switching intentions is analysed and relativised, and we provide operational suggestions for loyalty strategies addressing Millennials.

Keywords: Millennials; banking; switching intentions; COVID-19; PLS-SEM; trust; perceived value; commitment; perception; customer loyalty.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWI.2022.127667

International Journal of Work Innovation, 2022 Vol.3 No.3, pp.289 - 315

Received: 14 Sep 2022
Accepted: 25 Sep 2022
Published online: 13 Dec 2022 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article