Bridging from segmentation to customer experience

I only visit a bank about 4 times a year and yesterday began to realise why, when I found myself 8th?in the queue at Santander, trying to pay in 3 cheques that weren’t recognised by the automated cheque paying in system. After 10 minutes I was still 8thin the queue and was losing the will to live and started to have second thoughts about whether to bother, and that it was no wonder that all the banks and high street retailers are closing when the in-store or in-bank experience just wastes time in a poor quality, non-customer centric environment.

I then started to listen to the customer, in her late seventies, that was at the front of the queue with the teller, being told that her paying in book was being compulsorily replaced with a debit card, that would arrive in the post this week and that she would need to use her debit card in the ATM in order to activate it for contactless payments and then would need to click on ‘other services’ on the ATM in order to change the PIN. The teller might equally have said that a couple of Martians were going to come around to her house with a spaceship full of cash and would challenge the OAP to a game of laser tennis, which if she won, would enable her to be paid her pension from the cash in the spaceship. She turned away from the counter staring in bewilderment at her now defunct paying in book, that looked like it had been her trusted companion for the last 20+ years, with a sense of loss and confusion. I couldn’t help but think she’d probably forgotten all the instructions from the teller by the time she walked out of the bank and onto the street.

The next customer was likely in his 80’s and approached the teller asking to pay 3 household bills. The teller asked him a few probing questions about money laundering which had the customer looking scared and bemused at the same time as he battled to remember his PIN. He was then asked if he’d made payments to these payees before, to which he responded; “yes, I pay them in here every month”, before opening up a broader conversation with the teller about the price of food and the recent increase in his council tax. At first I thought; hasn’t he heard of Direct Debits? Surely he could save himself a bunch of time along with the rest of us in the queue (The queue was now up to 10 with me in 7th?position). The octogenarian now started to engage in a new conversation about the war in Ukraine with the teller, at which point the rest of the queue was starting to look at their FitBits at the lack of exercise in the last hour and the fact that they’d spent most of their lunch break in Santander.??It had now become?apparent that the reason the customer was there, was to engage in a conversation with a human being, the payment of bills was incidental and was merely the vehicle for a fleeting social interaction that may well have been his first that day.

After the 2nd?customer had left the bank and whilst the remaining 5 customers conducted their transactions, I considered the fact that we all race towards creating Customer experiences that are super efficient and that leverage technology, without thinking about the needs of All of our target customers. A segmentation and insight into customers with similar needs and behaviours is often voiced, but seldom implemented effectively, at the point of execution. As we race towards a future of technology and AI we shouldn’t forget that there are some of our customer segments who would engage and advocate our brands more, if we showed that we understood their needs and reflected them in our execution. At The Capability Bridge we specialise in helping our clients utilise their segmentation to develop insights that are leveraged in strategy and more importantly perhaps, take into account how it can be executed.