Consumers’ behaviours towards retail banking in the UK are changing quickly, but the need for a human touch remains according to a BT and Avaya study.
The survey, conducted on 2,000 people in the UK, France and Spain, showed a 44% growth in the number of channels used by customers to access banks’ services – including face-to-face at the branch, telephone, mobile app, website, ATM, social media and by post.
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The use of mobile apps has risen from 7% in 2012 to 23% in 2014. In the same period, web-chat has grown from 1% to 11%, and 3% of people have already tried to contact their bank via video, a channel that was totally unused two years ago.
Social media is also becoming more popular with a quarter of the people saying they would like "to use it to communicate with financial services in the future". Already 17% Spaniards follow their bank on facebook, against 8% of the French and 6% of British people.
Tom Regent, president of global banking and financial markets at BT Global Services, said: "The research shows that people have a huge appetite for new technologies that make companies easy to do business with but still want the human touch of traditional service."
Despite the rise of digital channels, four out of five surveyed visited a branch in the passed year. 57% of the UK consumers think the bank service is too faceless and 48% of all the surveyed would like to know by name an individual to call or e-mail when contacting their bank.
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By GlobalData"Successful financial services companies will be those that strike the right balance between automation and human interaction – whether that interaction takes place face-to-face or is delivered over the phone, video or web-chat," Regent added.
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