The Point of Sale (POS) machine reads that your transaction was declined, but the alert on your phone says otherwise. It’s been two days, and your bank hasn’t returned your debited cash. As a busy worker in the bustling Lagos Metropolis, you don’t have time to visit the nearest bank branch so you as well as many other Nigerians, take to Twitter to complain. The Future Of Work Africa has delved into analysing complaints like these, exploring how Nigerians talk about their banks and advising the best responses for the banks.
According to Ayodeji Faniyan the Chief Data Analyst, Future Of Work Africa, “Different conversations are happening on social media daily,” hence a bold approach using data and analytics must be made to achieve social listening for brands. The study sieved through 400,000+ tweets in the period of January to December 2019; highlighting a total number of 32 banks being mentioned. Specifically, the data making up the research was gathered between November 2019 and December 2019.
Off the bat, findings suggest that Nigerians were mostly discussing transactional complaints about their banks on Twitter; inferring that most people came to Twitter to seek resolution on banking problems with the top five words being ATM, Transfer, Credit, Debit and Balance. Bank praising was almost nearly inexistent, suggesting that banks needed to place better emphasis on brand building.
Big players in the industry like Stanbic and Gtbank were said to have the most negative complaints flooding the platform. The claims had a concentration of occurrence around midday, specifically between 12 PM to 1 PM. It is suggested that banks latch on to these facts and set up autoresponders with a personal tone to enable quality engagement in these time brackets. During eras of festivities, it is also proposed temporary ATMs are set up around the event hotspots to reduce complaints.
Furthermore, research also showed that each bank had a specific peak day of mentions. For instance, Access bank had peak mentions on Wednesday, Stanbic on Friday, Zenith on Sunday, Union on Friday and so on. These mentions were saturated with ATM complaints, especially on Mondays. A reason for this could be people squandering cash over the weekend and being unable to withdraw money the following Monday at an ATM.
To avoid complaints on Monday mornings about ATMs, banks should ensure their ATMs are well filled up on Sunday evenings, and they take note of their peak mentions days, having more attendants at hand.
The analysis gives an in-depth and insightful look into the banking industry’s issues and explores how banks are tackling them. It explores the most mentioned banks on Twitter for the year 2019, the responses of the banks to the complaints and makes recommendations for some of these problems.
Future of Work Africa is a data analytics, consulting, and training company. We provide insights drawn from data to societies, organisations, and individuals make better decisions. In 2019, we published reports, derived from data analytics about the #SexForGrades scandal and #KogiDecides, bringing to the fore insights about the factors that characterised both trends.
Toluwanimi Onakoya is a spirited writer, creative and videographer. Her biggest drive is to connect with people and depict tales using various forms of media.
Toluwanimi is available on Instagram and Twitter @nimi_onaks
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