You and Your Customer: Please Stop Calling It a ‘Relationship’
By Jim Perry, senior strategist at Market Insights
Simple Subscribe
Subscribe Now!
No consumer wakes up in the morning saying, “I want a deeper relationship with my bank.”
I’ve used that line at enough conferences to know it always gets a laugh — and the laugh is what’s telling.
People recognize it as true the moment they hear it, even though it contradicts nearly everything their own institution’s marketing tells them to believe.
Read any community bank or credit union strategic plan and you’ll find words like these within the first paragraph:
• “Deepening member relationships.”
• “Relationship banking.”
• “Relationship pricing.”
It’s in the mission statement, the branch signage, the loan officer’s LinkedIn headline. It has become so standard that nobody stops to ask whether it’s true.
Reality check: But it isn’t true. Not for most people, most of the time.
We just keep pretending otherwise.
Need to Know:
- “Relationship” has become industry shorthand for something most retail customers never asked for — and the data on how banks measure it (products per household, cross-sell ratios) proves the word describes the institution’s goals, not the customer’s experience.
- Customers judge their bank the way they judge a utility: invisible when it works, urgent when it breaks. Reliability and responsiveness, not relationship depth, are what actually keep customers from leaving.
- The exception proves the rule: Relationship banking is real and earned in commercial and high-net-worth private banking. Applying that language to mass retail customers is a stretch, even in the smallest communities.
Ask your average checking account holder to describe their relationship with their bank the way they’d describe a relationship with a person — a friend, a spouse, a neighbor — and watch them struggle.
They don’t think about their bank between logins. They didn’t choose it because they felt a connection. They chose it because:
• It was close.
• Their parents used it.
• A friend recommended it.
• Or the app didn’t look terrible.
Bottom line: That’s not a relationship. That’s a vendor selection.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s honesty about how people actually experience financial services.
And the industry would build better products and marketing if it started from that honesty instead of a word that flatters the institution more than it describes the customer.
Why the Word Survives — and the Harm It Does
“Relationship” persists because it serves the bank’s internal logic, not the customer’s. It’s baked into how the industry measures success: relationship depth, products per household, and other measures of wallet share.
The truth is, these are all ways of asking “How much of this person’s financial life have we captured,” dressed up in the language of intimacy.
Somewhere along the way, “relationship” stopped meaning mutual commitment and started meaning wallet share.
There’s a real cost to this. Tell frontline staff their job is to build relationships, and you’re telling them to look for openings — the cross-sell conversation, the “relationship review” meeting.
The institution sees diligence.
The customer may see an unwanted sales conversation.
The customer wanted to deposit a check. The bank wanted to talk about their financial goals. Only one of those parties asked for the conversation.
Read more: Mass Affluent Wealth Clients Need Both Digital Tools and Better Human Advice
Where ‘Relationship’ Fits the Facts
There’s an obvious exception worth naming: commercial banking and high-net-worth private banking, where an actual person, known by name, picks up the phone and remembers your situation.
That is a relationship, and it’s earned the word. But it’s a small slice of most institutions’ customer base — the overwhelming majority of “relationship” language gets applied to retail accountholders who will never speak to a human being outside a call center queue.
The central fiction: Stretching a private-banking word over a mass-retail reality is where the disconnect starts.
What Do Customers Really Want? And How Can Banks Provide It?
Customers crave two things for banks, and neither of them is emotional.
Reliability. The account does what it’s supposed to do. The transfer clears when it says it will. The card isn’t declined for no reason. The statement matches what actually happened. Reliability is invisible when it’s working — that’s the point.
Good banking should feel like electricity: You don’t think about it until it’s gone.
Responsiveness. When something does go wrong — fraud alert, denied transaction, a lost card, a death in the family that needs an account resolved — someone deals with it quickly and competently, without making the customer fight for it.
Responsiveness is what reliability’s absence demands, and it’s the moment that determines loyalty.
Nobody switches banks because the relationship manager didn’t call enough. People switch because something broke and nobody fixed it fast enough.
Framed this way, loyalty becomes operational rather than emotional.
You can build a scorecard around reliability and responsiveness. You can’t meaningfully build one around “relationship depth,” because depth is a proxy for products sold, not for how the customer feels.
Read more: Response Time is a Persistent Customer Pain Point. The Solution is on Your Desk
A Word about ‘Relational’ AI in Banking
You’ll hear a version of this counterargument as agentic AI moves into banking: Customers respond better to AI that feels warm and relational than to AI that feels purely mechanical.
True, but it’s not the same claim as “customers want a relationship with their bank.”
Warmth in an automated interaction compensates for something specific — as machines take over more of the interaction, customers simply need reassurance that a human still understands what’s happening.
Why the distinction matters: That’s a design requirement for the interaction itself, not evidence people want an ongoing emotional bond with the institution behind it.
Read more: Retail Bankers Are Adopting AI for All the Wrong Reasons
A New Scorecard Will Focus on the Two Key Factors
If your institution wants to earn loyalty, stop asking “How do we deepen the relationship” and start asking two harder questions:
• Where are we failing to be reliable — the small breakdowns customers absorb quietly but remember?
• And when something goes wrong, how fast and how well do we actually show up to fix it?
Those questions won’t fit neatly into a “relationship banking” campaign. They’re less flattering to say out loud in a board meeting. But they describe what your customers are actually grading you on, whether or not you’re using their language to talk about it.
The bottom line: The problem isn’t the word “relationship” itself. It’s the assumptions it encourages — that institutions are doing something they’re not, and measuring something that isn’t there.
“Reliability and responsiveness” is a lower bar to describe and a much higher bar to clear. That’s worth the trade.
Read next: Tracking Customers’ Spending Patterns Can Drive Better Personalization
