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This study aims to investigate the factors that influence South African customers to potentially switch from one bank to another. Instead of using established models and survey techniques, the research measured social media sentiment to measure threats to switch.

The research involved a 12-month analysis of social media sentiment, specifically customer threats to switch banks (churn). These threats were then analysed for co-occurring themes to provide data on the reasons customers were making these threats. The study used over 1.7 million social media posts and focused on all five major South African retail banks (essentially the entire sector).

This study concluded that seven factors are most significant in understanding the underlying causes of churn. These are turnaround time, accusations of unethical behaviour, billing or payments, telephonic interactions, branches or stores, fraud or scams and unresponsiveness.

This study is unique in its measurement of unsolicited social media sentiment as opposed to most churn-related research that uses survey- or customer-data-based methods. In addition, this study observed the sentiment of customers from all major retail banks across 12 months. To date, no studies on retail bank churn theory have provided such an extensive perspective. The findings contribute to Susan Keaveney’s churn theory and provide a new measurement of switching threat through social media sentiment analysis.

This study analysed the effect of online negative word-of-mouth (nWOM) firestorms in the retail banking sector. By understanding negative sentiment and sentiment recovery across an entire retail banking sector, the research exposed a unique view of banking in South Africa.

The study made use of both a sentiment and topic analysis of over 1.7 million social media posts in South Africa. The methodology made use of both NLP and human validation techniques to measure changes in social media sentiment during online firestorms. This measurement included each of South Africa's major retail banks over a twelve month period.

From the analysis, key trigger characteristics for these firestorms (product failures, service failures, social failures and communication failures) were categorised. In addition, the average duration of a firestorm was calculated and factors that impact sentiment recovery were explored.

The study was located in South Africa and, unlike firm level studies, researched nWOM for the whole retail banking sector. A theoretical footprint depicting the typical anatomy of a firestorm was derived in order to aid stakeholders to be more vigilant and better equipped to provide correct intervention in such times of crisis.