Clari5

Simplifying Banking Engagement!

Simplifying Banking Engagement and Empowering your Customers

Rapid change in the banking technology and the behavior of customers pushes banks to be on par with the industry. Gone are the days where everything was complex starting from standing in the queue, filling the form, money transfer, etc. Customers are now searching / looking for those products and companies that can simplify their lives.

Simplicity is mutually beneficial to both customers and banks. In this digital generation where people are always online and busy, expect banks to make their banking experience easier. Customers these days are demanding greater personalization, flexibility, better value, improved service, choice and control. Banks need to reevaluate their  assumptions and fundamentally change how they interact with their customers.  Giving more power to customers by making them have greater control over their money may be uncomfortable to banks, but in the long run it will fetch great result and success.

To simply engagement with customers, banks have introduced multi-channel banking. Multi-channel banking is the buzzword in today’s banking world; the banks are competing to increase their reach by adding new customer touch points, including laptops, PCs, mobile phones, tablets, smart ATMs. Banking on the go is one of the basic need of this tech savvy, young population.

Study below shows the channel usage and their satisfaction level. Source (EY Global Consumer Banking Survey 2014)

The graph above depicts the most commonly / frequently used channels: Online, Mobile and ATM’s tops the chart. When we talk about the satisfaction level of these channels Online and ATM’s  are commonly used by the customers with 36% & 35% of satisfaction level each. On the other hand  channels like Mobile and Branch offices satisfaction level is less compared to online channels.

Apart from using multi-channel banking, banks should encourage their customers to play an active role in tailoring their products and services that alleviate and fix problems. Also, customers care more about convenience than about channels. Banks need to look beyond multi-channel toward a fully integrated banking experience. Banks should focus on marketing offers that are relevant to them and send alerts in real-time. This will not only simply banking engagement, but also enhance the customer experience.

Customer Experience is paramount to establish trust and confidence in banks. Customers are becoming more assertive and taking greater control of their banking relationships. Customers are now more demanding and want their banking experience to be simple, easy and tailored according to their needs. Hence, banks should customize the services based on the customer needs.

Banking Customer Experience in Middle East

Banking Customer Experience in Middle East

The growing importance of customer experience has taken over the banking industry by storm. A recent report published by E&Y details out latest trends in customer experience from around the globe and suggests that banks should aggressively leverage valuable insights from customer behavior to effectively chart out their customer experience strategy.

The infographic below throws light on banking customer experience in Middle East and how implementing real-time technology solutions result in customer delight by making use of deep customer insights.

 

 

Five ways Banks can ensure annus horribilis for Customer Experience in 2014!

1. Offer to downgrade:  Banks can bombard the best customers with offers to downgrade their status. For example, they can get the relationship manager to call the platinum card holder and offer her to issue a silver credit card.

2. Cross sell irrelevant products: Its relatively easy doing this.  Run the algorithm on a customer relationship and identify the least fit product. The teller can than try to cross sell it to the unsuspecting customer. A new low can be achieved by wrong-timing the pitch. Example:  Offer a car loan at a cheaper rate to customer who purchased car last week.

3. Antipathetic complaint redressal mechanism:  There are more than one ways to do it. Make customers jump through hoops to reach the customer care executives.  Refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists. Get customers to start over every time they want to check the status. Cross sell irrelevant products when the customers call to complain.

4. Commoditize the customer:  Converting the customer from individual to a commodity has monopoly rule at the pinnacle of horrible customer experience.  One sentence that really does the trick is,” we deal with hundreds of customer like you.”

5. Continue with antiquated processes: After all, old is gold. Continuation with antiquated processes will ensure that customers have to fill forms in triplicate and visit multiple counters for each transaction. Then cross sell irrelevant products to them.

From the days when customer experience management was more titular than operational, today its closely correlates with lower customer attrition and better financial results for the banks.  Hopefully, the banks will endeavor to avoid the above 5 mistakes thus achieving superior results.

By Ratnesh Pandey

Ratnesh is Head of Marketing at CustomerXPs.

He can be reached at clari5@customerxps.com

CustomerXPs offers real-time, intelligent products that empower banks with instant insights enabling influenced outcomes of deeper customer engagement and fraud-free transactions.