By Okorie Jane Onyinyechi
Customer relations is clients oriented and at its root lie the need to create a convivial atmosphere that will be beneficial to the organization and its sundry clients. Customer relations entail building or establishing a relationship between an organization and its customers through excellent service provision and delivery in other to create an impressionable opinion of the organization in the minds of the customers. Therefore, this study, “customer relations practice in the old and new generation banks: A comparative analysis”, compares and analyses the customer relations practices of both old and new generation banks in Nigeria with the view to identifying their distinct customer relations orientation and its implications on banks’ profits and sustenance. Using survey research and In-depth Interview methods, 384 respondents were sampled through cluster, quota and systematic sampling techniques respectively. This was from the total population of 783,047 for Enugu and Awka Metropolis. The questionnaire and interview were the instruments of data collection. The findings reveal no bank in Nigeria (both old and new generation banks) has found lasting solution to the problem of traffic and queuing system, which is attributed to staff inefficiency. However, new generation banks were found to do better in terms of service delivery and handling of customers’ complaints. At the final analysis, it is recommended that since all efforts to eliminate long queues in Nigeria banks has not yielded much results, banks should employ more staff as well as open more branches or expand the existing ones where necessary. Also, the daily withdrawal of the maximum of One Hundred Thousand Naira (N100, 000) with ATM Cards should be reviewed upwards so that the customers would have lesser transactions to make inside the banks.