If supermarkets with their targeted offers and engaging stores are held up as the champions of delivering an exceptional customer experience, then it’s fair to say that banks are currently seen by many consumers as behind the curve, write B.R.Shashidhar and Avijit Saha

A lack of trust between customers and banks is central to the problem. In fact, a recent YouGov survey found that only six per cent of consumers regard banks as trustworthy . In addition, poor service quality and low levels of personal relationships that exist between the two, limited pricing and product offerings frustrate customers further.

Earlier this year, the Government felt compelled to act and introduced regulations compelling banks to make switching accounts easier. From September, 46 million current account holders have been able to move to another bank within seven days. For some high street banks this came as a major blow as it added to the mountain of customer challenges they have to face, after all, it makes it even easier for customers to flit between the most appealing banks.

However, the new regulation should be viewed as an opportunity, especially in the customer services arena. Forward looking banks are focusing on prioritising those customers that are going to make the biggest difference and re-double their efforts on managing service, developing trust and building a personal relationship.

As banks begin to ramp up their customer service they find major internal hurdles. For example, many are structured around different products or channel silos and the result of recent acquisitions. As a result, the various pieces of customer information captured by banks are not synchronised to provide a holistic customer view, limiting a bank’s ability to provide a true cohesive multi-channel offering. In order to tackle this and minimise customer attrition, one of the first things banks need to do is create a 360 degree customer view and in turn, improve channel banking capabilities.

Key to creating this holistic view of a customer is a cross-channel dashboard. This means having a single customer profile that contains all transaction and product information from all touch points of the customer’s journey, including sales, customer service and even social media interactions. This can be used by all teams to build stronger customer relationships, provide improved services and more importantly, cross and up sell new offerings. An effective customer dashboard will need to be able to segment customers and provide a life time value score. As well as a record of all transactions, it will provide a risk profile as well demographic and psychographic information. With this level of detail banks will be able to create targeted offers at the right time to individual customers.

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Once a bank has established a single view of its customer, it should look towards the retail sector to fully understand how customer insights can be best utilised to personalise interactions. The rise of mobile technologies and social media has had a huge, positive impact on customer experience in general, as all industries. In particular, the banking sector now has the ability to engage with customers in real-time, from any location.

To take full advantage of this shift, banks need a comprehensive range of products and services with a strong focus towards self-service, such as an online account opening, Personal Financial Management, Financial Advice, and even real-time video based collaboration and training. To drive this kind of functionality, banks need to adopt a ‘write-once, run everywhere’ architecture which have responsive design and the functionality to provide a consistent service across all channels and devices. From a technology point of view, there are platforms available to integrate multiple technology systems to create these dashboards. Cloud based models can make these investments quick to deploy and deliver a rapid return on investment. It does not require a rip and replace of major IT systems.

If this personal approach at first seems a little uncomfortable, banks can be reassured that done in the right way, customers do appreciate targeted promotions. That means promotions and offers that have a perceived value. In essence it is about creating a circle of trust between the bank and their customer. As consumers continue to grow in power, initiatives such as the seven day switch will test the banking industry’s ability to attract and retain customers, improve customer experience and personalise offerings. In today’s day and age, technology, along with information and back-end strategy integration will become the enablers in establishing an approach that will achieve this. Banks will be rewarded if they evolve their channel strategies, break internal silos and take incremental steps to retain customers with a personalised and memorable experience.

 

B.R.Shashidhar is Practice Head, Consumer and Commercial Banking Practice at Infosys and Avijit Saha is Consumer Analytics Lead, Consumer Banking Practice at Infosys