Managing Service Quality - The Ingredients in the Turbulent Financial Services Market
Financial institutions have undergone several competitions and changes over the years. Customers are conscious and comparative about any ounce of service they receive from any institution and are eager to praise or express dissatisfaction using their various platforms. The importance and increasing attention to service quality in financial institutions is fully justified by the socio-political changes that have arisen. With increasing customer awareness, expectations, and demands as a result of globalization, Banks and other financial institutions can only stay at the top by deliberately designing dynamic products and services that are at potent pace with the rapid changes in customer tastes. However, just like an excellently prepared speech could be poorly delivered, outstandingly designed products and services could be horribly delivered, affecting the overall customer experience and satisfaction.
For goods, it is easier to take units to the laboratory to test conformance to quality standards. For services, however, it is almost always difficult to ascertain when the standard has been met or when the recipient is satisfied. This is because different customers have different perceptions about what constitute quality services and there is no uniform way of expressing satisfactions. Unsurprisingly, the suit of services that makes Joseph delighted could make John dyspeptic. Thus, for Banks, managing service quality and rendering consistent quality services is not only difficult, but equally delicate.
Despite this difficulty, banks and other financial institutions must find a way to satisfy their customers if they wish to compete optimally in the increasingly competitive market where customers' expectations are not only broad but blistering. While there is no template for making all customers happy, banks can keep their customers satisfied by taking the following actions:
To satisfy customers, Banks need to understand, on a real time basis, the psychological and socio-economic characteristics of their customers. Information regarding their favorite places, applications, lifestyles, vacation times, incomes, birthdays, social media platforms, investments, and so on, are important for designing products that meet their needs. This is because, the first step to a great customer experience is understanding what your customers are thinking. By deploying surveys and gathering feedback across all channels, you can generate a customer experience pulse to discover opportunities for improvement. In-branch (office) feedback, customer support feedback, website and mobile feedback, and relationship feedback are often recommended for generating customer real time data that can be used for designing and delivering high quality products and services that meet customer needs.
2. Monitor end-to-end customer journeys to create 360degree view of every customer
Understanding a varying group of customers only provide a general understanding of what drives their needs and how to satisfy them. However, the most effective approach is to monitor and understand individual customer journeys across touchpoints. "A common banking customer journey may include a business professional checking her account balance online, depositing a paycheck in-branch, and verifying the deposited funds on a smartphone. You should have feedback experiences in place at all three touchpoints. This can be achieved by identifying the different customer types; outlining the journey for how each customer type engages with your institution, and; identifying at-risk customers and proactively engage on a personal level to improve, and hopefully, salvage the relationship.
In the financial services market, the journeys of customers (and each step within that journey) could take place over several years. This implies customer experience measurement should be more than once at each touch point and across historical data sets.
3. Identify key business drivers and take action to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
Customer loyalty is fundamental to corporate success and it is the reason every organization strives to gain and retain loyal customers. The marketing and sales costs, efforts and time required to attract a new customer is more than that required to implement a feedback system that alerts you to a customer's likelihood to leave before it happens. Identify what drives your customers' businesses and how changes in the business drivers affect their choices of banking partners/institutions. For instance, a customer who recently diversify from manufacturing to real estate may have his financing tastes changed from short term to long term.
Banks can use Net Promoters' Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Survey or another approach to evaluate the current position of customer experience, and start identifying what drives customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction). When these are identified, it helps the organization on where to focus their efforts and resources.
4. Track and address individual customer feedback with closed-loop functionality: Individual feedback are very important and tracking as well as addressing them provides an organization with an edge on customer experience management. Low NPS scores, social media complaints, or a poor support phone call can alert a customer experience program owners to a negative customer experience. All customer engagements can be tracked and managed in the experience management system to not only make sure each instance is addressed and resolved, but also teach and inform employees for future experiences.
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5. Integrate Customer Experience Management (CXM) within the existing software platforms (e.g Mobile Apps)
Content management system should be integrated in all existing platforms for maximum results. The system should have the capacity to generate additional sales step or grade if a customer reaches a particular threshold. For instance, a customer who regularly make transfers, in aggregate of certain amounts, should have his/her limits adjusted by the system even without a request, provided regulatory requirements are not breached.
6. Integrate customer experience with employee feedback
Employees are pivotal to the design and delivery of high quality services and achieving customer satisfaction. Connected, engaged employees are critical to delivering customer experience. Organizations need to to consistently generate employee feedback to understand the barriers to greater employee engagement and performance. This is especially true for front-line employees in banks, credit unions, and insurance companies, who interact with hundreds of customers each day. Leadership within the organization at all levels should be held responsible for quality and customer satisfaction and reward system for outstanding employees in this area should be clearly designed and communicated.
7. Implementing an appropriate manning strategy for back and front office
Employees are the key ingredients of quality service delivery. To enhance quality service delivery, adequate number and class of employees must be engaged across the back and front offices. As only happy employees can make customers happy, a stressed, fatigued and dizzy customer service officer cannot make a customer smile.
The back office is fundamental to success in quality service delivery. The front desk officer is like a person distributing cookies. The quality of what he/she gives to the customers is dependent on the quality of what is received from the back office and the degree of responsiveness to their requests. Every organization that wants to pursue quality must ensure both back offices and front offices are appropriately manned in s manner that is consistent with corporate strategy around quality.
9. Be flexible to change, update, and add features to your products, platforms and process at all times
One of the commonest characteristics of today's service market is rapid changes occasioned by technology, globalization and high customer expectations. Building a world-class customer experience culture requires an organization to have a responsive ability to changes, new trends, and emergent technologies. The best organizations do not wait to respond to changes in the market that drive customer experience, rather, they lead these changes and provide their customers with the best possible experiences that followers of change cannot.
10. Internalizing a culture of continuous improvement and Total Quality Management
To enhance optimal quality service delivery, organizations must evaluate their current systems, processes and people with a view to improve from the current stance. Products, processes, people and technologies must be regularly evaluated to ensure current features still meet customer needs while new features identified from customer experience feedback are added. Without a culture of continuous improvement, no organization can provide products and services that meet the ever-evolving customers needs in the current markets that is characterized by rapid changes in tastes, demand and technologies.