Customer Services - Keep It Simple

On 6th March 2013, I approached my bank (it is one of the largest bank in the UK) for opening a business current account for my company. I am not particularly happy with this bank, but when I needed to open an account for my business, I thought my past 10 years of (good) transaction history would help me in getting the account opened fast. As I write this in the last week of May 2013, my account is open, but I cannot transact! So much for the (good) transaction history! When the rest of the world is moving on and jumping on the digital ship, why is the financial services lagging behind? Its not that banks have not onboarded the digital band-wagon, but my experience shows that their digital face is just perfunctory – it continues to sit on top of ancient systems, processes and people who believe they live in 1950s. Another example. While I was facing the challenges opening the bank account, I tweeted my frustration to this bank’s tweet handler. All I got from them was “we’re looking into your complaint…”, “..have you contacted the customer helpdesk…”. Basically farce. I could not discern any eagerness on the part of the tweet handler to solve my issue. When a customer decides to approach you with a complaint, he says, “hey I am unhappy, but don’t want to leave you yet! Please set the things right!”. This is a golden opportunity for you to jump up to the occasion, take an extra step and provide mind-boggling customer service. And you miss that opportunity??? Some UK banks are offering digital banking, contactless cards and what-nots! I wonder how do they do this, while simultaneously taking 8 working days for a credit check (I get mine done in less than 5 minutes); 7 working days for compliance checks (it takes at the most 30 minutes to run the identify through all the systems); and, 78 days (and still counting!) to provide all functionalities to a customer to operate his account! Something is fundamentally wrong in the current operating model and architecture of the financial services. And it is not entirely their fault. While on the one hand we expect our banks, insurers, brokers to keep pace with technology, at the other we expect them to conduct their business with ever more caution, in the wake of financial crisis, identity theft etc. Are these two issues mutually incompatible? Are we expecting too much? Or does the fault lie with the inertia in the bank? The Internet and mobile have brought fundamental change in the way we seek and respond to our information needs. A couple of decades ago, we would happily wait for two weeks for a service request (let’s say change of address) to be fulfilled. And we were extremely happy with the timeline. Since the bank launched their website, our expectation has increased geometrically. Not content with checking my balance on any PC, now I expect my balance to be available on my mobile! And this list can go on. What has changed is our expectation of service from a service provider who has not kept pace with the time, but has continued to apply coats of makeup on a system (process and technology) which has never been designed to operate in this way. Rather than making structural changes in the system, banks and other institutions have continued to pay lip-service by making available a facility which is manually fulfilled at the back-end and then entered in the system to give an appearance of automated fulfilment. Such a façade is good to begin with if your competitors are scoring ahead of you on that count. But quickly it becomes a big problem as you have raised customers’ expectations. For a customer, finding another channel to communicate to a bank is a delight. However, underlying this delight is a (mis)belief, that for a bank, the customer is one single entity across the channels – post, email, web, mobile, social media. After all, he has willingly given all his usernames to you – so you should not have any issues identifying him across the channels. And because you can recognise your customers across the channels, so he is no longer obliged to restrict to one channel for a service request. The customer can inquire on a channel, get a quote on another, start an application on another and finally complete on yet another channel. For example, I ask for information of a new account by sending a text, use my tablet and get a quotation, start an application using my PC at work and finally complete my application at home. Yet, the experience is far from this. Instead of one seamless transaction across the channels, I find, I have to input the same set of data every time I change a channel, or, every time I log in using a same channel! Clearly something is missing here. When I compare this experience with other service providers – mobiles, for example, I get remarkably better experience. What have the mobile providers done that the banks cannot do? Launching a new channel (e.g., web self-service, mobile channel, social media) is a serious business. Have you thought of what gaps will it address in your current communication model? Have you thought of how it will complement/supplement the existing channels? How will it overlap with other channels? And how will you unify the messages across the various channels into one coherent message from your customer? I am again reminded of my bank and the time they launched their twitter handler. The poor operator was literally begging for some work on twitter: “Hi! I’m here to help. Please ask questions.” I would get this message every single day from my bank. And when the time came to seek help, clearly the bank had not thought through the end-to-end process of receiving, servicing and closing a complaint on Twitter!! So while I kept on bombarding the twitter handler with my frustration and asking what he is planning to do, all I could get was “I’m looking into this…. Please contact customer services…. So sorry to hear about your experience….” What should have ideally happened? a. Someone complains on Twitter; respond immediately, apologise b. Send a URL or a ref no in the public domain (twitter) and ask the complainant to call customer service with the ref number. You need to isolate the complainant ASAP before he can do further damage to your brand on the social media. This action lets other followers see that (i) you respond immediately and positively; and (ii) you are paying individual attention to the complaint. So you have turned a potentially damaging situation into a good PR exercise. c. However, if the complainant does not get his complaint resolved with your intervention, you’re in for a worse backlash. So you need to have an A-team ready to handle ‘special cases’ d. If you were to take a bold step, once the issue is resolved, tweet about the successful resolution and tag the complainant asking for his feedback. In the same way, if you have multiple channels of communication with your customers, but you do not have all the channels managed optimally, sometimes assigning a simple reference number, and asking the client to input the reference number for a particular service request will do away with the necessity of asking customer to fill in the same information every time. Managing a reference number in a ‘lookup’ is a fairly simple process, irrespective of the complexity or legacy of your applications/processes. Creating an agile and responsive customer service is not solely dependent on the technologies. Technologies – especially the new ones, like Business Process Management – helps, but they require a lot more that your systems can currently deliver. For example, for BPM to run effectively and provide optimal value, you need all your reference data in one place, your processes should be rationalised and your workforce flexible to be moved around. A tall task, if you look at the back office of most of the financial services companies at least. This does not go to mean that financial services companies can/should not implement new technologies. However, often, while your data is getting resolved, building a small team who are empowered to take decisions on the spot (to be rectified later on) and having sufficient access to resolve an issue, will go a long way to build your customer services credentials and pave way for your investments in new technologies. Financial services organisations have been investing significantly in upgrade of their technologies. However, they have not paid due diligence to the operating models to enable the new technologies. As such, you have old, processes running on new technologies –something akin to an old sedan chassis on a V5 (or whatever is the latest) engine: while you have the power below your bonnet, your seats and doors and dashboard will continue to rattle while you drive. And that is NOT going to be a pleasant driving experience. Before upgrading your systems, please think processes. Do you have the right processes to run on the new systems? And most important, have you fostered in the right environment for your people to execute them? After all, taking the sedan example, what good is a brand new engine or a chassis, if the person behind the wheels does not know how to drive?