From Dissatisfied to Delighted Customers - can
the financial services industry catch up?
By Sarah Haskell, Group Marketing Director,
Portrait Software
The financial services industry boasts some of the most well-established brands in the UK, yet much has been made of the high levels of customer dissatisfaction that remain. Data from analyst house The Gartner Group shows that almost a quarter of interactions with a typical bank are rated as 'poor', but only two per cent of dissatisfied customers actively complain. Of the rest, almost half (45%) defect and the institutions never know why.
But banks should know why their customers are dissatisfied, regardless of how they are in contact with them - via the call centre, over the Internet, in a branch outlet or by post - due to the huge investments in customer relationship management technology made in recent years. Yet still it seems few are managing to translate this potential customer knowledge into better service or improved sales, and actually end up squandering the goodwill of existing customers.
A financial services company that is capable of acting on its customer's decisions and keeping promises will consistently create large numbers of evangelists for its brand - or create customer delight.
Delighted customers tell their friends, colleagues and associates about their great experiences with a brand. People who do not engage in this type of evangelism are merely satisfied. Most interactions fall into an apathy zone where customer expectations are simply met rather than exceeded in any meaningful way. These interactions are often routine - day-to-day events like billing enquiries, account status or ATM withdrawal. The irony is that good performance here wins few plaudits. But failure leads inexorably to customer disgust.
So why are UK banks and financial services companies still failing their customers? A lack of clarity over many UK retail banks' channel strategy is still a problem. Some banks are fully online whilst others have a different mix, either reducing branches or increasing presence in the community. This can result in a lack of consistency in performance across the various channels the customer happens to choose.
Secondly, banks have built up internal and external channels up as silos. They have either been product-centric or channel-centric organizations but not customer-centric organisations. The last truly painful change for a bank is to be truly customer-centric, which involves bringing those silos together.
Financial services organisations often suffer from lack of investment in controlling or automating the processes that drive interactions with customers; much of the supporting technology is old. Most use a variety of different technology from different vintages on which they run their strategic applications.
These technology 'silos' isolate applications and data, resulting in multiple, disparate views of each customer that constrain service quality. In addition hard-coded applications and interfaces limit change.
Together these factors mean that managing customer experiences is not easy. And a further complication is the fact that industry regulations around privacy, risk and transparency can often conflict with a customer's need for information.
Financial services companies that can deal with these most demanding relational interactions efficiently and effectively accomplish real-time customer knowledge. Relevant customer interactions, consistently improve customer service as well as compliant and traceable customer interaction infrastructure. And then, starting to turn apathetic customers into delighted ones should be only a step away.
A former Gartner analyst, Sarah Haskell has worked for in the technology industry for over 20 years including for various IBM divisions. She is Portrait's Group Marketing Manager, and holds responsibility for expanding the company's US operations.
Portrait Software
Portrait Software™ specialises in Customer Interaction software that
helps build more responsive, more profitable customer relationships.
Its flagship product, Portrait Foundation™, is a specialised Application
Platform Suite that helps enterprises deliver next-generation applications
ideally suited to the new service-oriented architectures. Portrait
Foundation™ gets process-driven, composite applications to market
twice as fast as traditional development environments resulting in
adaptable Living Apps™ that support the most important and complex
processes: those that drive customer interactions and fulfill customer
demands.
Our 150 plus customers are organisations that lead the world's most demanding customer-intensive sectors, including Financial Services, Public Services, Contact Centres and the Independent Software Vendors that support these markets.
Portrait Software's UK customers include Nationwide Building Society, The Woolwich, Lloyds TSB, Chelsea Building Society, Cheshire Building Society and the largest police force in Europe. Mainland European customers include Komercni Banka (Czech Republic), SNT (Netherlands), Mapfre (Spain) and NovaKBM (Slovenia); and in the US customers include KeyCorp, Wells Fargo Bank, Rainier Pacific Bank and Fiserv CBS.
For more information please visit: www.portraitsoftware.com