Customer Advocacy through Compelling Customer Experience

What percentage of value-add activity are you achieving in your customer facing operations?
If less than 80%, then it is time for action

How many of your front-line staff can answer the question “how have I added value to customer experience today?”If less than 90%, then there is too much wasted effort and higher than necessary costs

Do your customer facing people and systems consistently help & drive enhanced customer experience?
If you are not very sure then there is a compelling case for a “voice of the customer” review of your systems and processes

Are your customer-facing staff systems and product experts or customer problem solvers?
If just experts then they – and therefore your organisation – will benefit from being problem solvers

How do you spot and remove barriers to rich customer experience and people motivation? Find out about “voice of the customer” at www.charteris.com/what_we_do/customer_centricity/

Making banking customers' experience compelling whilst cutting costs

"Your call is important to our bank; we’ll be with you as soon as possible....in the meantime here is some mind numbing music"

Ten years ago or so banks like many other major businesses recognised the opportunity to cut costs by directing more customers away from higher cost, face-to-face channels to call centres. They wanted to maximise the use of centralised customer contact centres to deliver a more efficient, consistent and auditable service. However, in the pursuit of cost reduction these organisations lost sight of the most important factor: the customer experience.

No business can afford to provide excellent customer service at any cost. But equally, no business can afford to ignore the importance of customer satisfaction.

Call centre cost reduction strategies like off-shoring or technology outsourcing have failed because they focus almost exclusively on improving the bottom line. They have not properly considered the implications for enterprise processes and management approaches and, more importantly, have not focused on the customer. So, anticipated financial and operational benefits have not been fully realised and customers remain largely dissatisfied i.e. a vicious circle.

Customer dissatisfaction has led to many institutions reversing their earlier decisions to offshore call centre operations. In their adverts many banks now make a point of having UK based call centres.

But cost savings and service improvements do not have to be mutually exclusive. If the customer experience is placed at the heart of a business transformation programme, opportunities can arise to improve both customer service levels and cut waste.

The Art of Possible:
There are three layers of corporate process that fundamentally drive performance excellence in a contact centre. They are contact centre strategy, operational planning and tactical execution. The strategic thinking, business analysis, detailed planning and communication that occur at each of these layers must be highly integrated from both the bottom up and the top down.

Only then will banks be able to determine where they are going – and have confidence in the belief that they are really going to be able to get there.

Saving costs and improving customer experience need not be mutually exclusive.

At Charteris we have customer centric contact centre expertise with experience gained in some of the country’s largest and most successful contact centres.

hoss.atri@charteris.com

Mobile Banking and Payments Innovations

The Demise of Cheques?

When did you last write a cheque? The average person in the UK now receives less than seven cheques per year. In 1990, 11 million cheques were issued per day, in 2008 the daily volume is approximately 4million cheques and APACS estimates that in eight years time there will be only 2.5 million cheques per day.

Non-paper based payments like direct debits, direct credits and cards have reduced the need for cheques. Insurance claims are now settled via direct bank transfers or pre-paid cards for the smaller amounts. You can now draw larger amounts over the counter at your bank branch using your chip and pin card as your proof of ID. So, why are there still 4 million or so cheques issued a day?

The main culprits include person to person and person to small business payments. This is because as yet there is no infrastructure in place in the UK to provide an electronic payments system for these payment types.

Now with the new UK Faster Payment Service - you can get the latest updates here – ramping up, the industry has taken the first step towards the eventual elimination of cheques. All that is required next is for your banks to enable you to download from their mobile banking site a mobile payment application that becomes a function of your mobile banking service.
OK, there is more to the technology jigsaw puzzle than my “all you need” but it is not rocket science either. A main component will be a bank and mobile operator agnostic database that securely stores you m- credentials and keeps these up to date. There are also a few governance, security, privacy and exception management considerations to iron out.

But m-payments will be a compelling win-win proposition for payers, for beneficiaries and great for the banks’ relationship with their customers. It has the potential for the banks to innovate new customer centric experiences for all of their customers.

Who needs cheques now? Imagine.... you can pay “Joe the plumber” for fixing your pipes by pressing a few buttons on your mobile and by the time he finishes saying thank you he gets confirmation of settlement from his bank on his mobile..same mobile also tells him that he should now transfer some money to his personal account to avoid going into the red.

The British a nation of shopkeepers? More like a nation of bankers.

Can banks cut more costs without risking customer service ?

Cost reduction through improving operational efficiency has been a consistent goal of financial services organisations. Techniques such as Lean have been adopted with significant success in many organisations.

However, recent research indicates that the pure application of such techniques, which were originally designed for the manufacturing sector, can be detrimental to customer experience when applied to service organisations.

In essence, process optimisation motivated primarily by a desire for cost reduction can lead to decisions which are detrimental to customer service.

Meanwhile , the behaviour of the financial services consumer continues to evolve; more sophisticated, more demanding and more likely to complain or transfer their business if their expectations are not met. Simultaneously, financial services organisations are recognising the true lifetime value of customer retention; looking to cross-sell and up-sell to their existing customer base.

In this context, what financial services organisations need is the confidence that their business critical process change programmes will enhance customer experience not acting to its detriment.

The key to drive business change successfully is direct and continuous engagement of the customer within the change process. Customers are the ultimate arbiters of the success of change initiatives – their “voice” can not only be a compelling reason for change but, properly engaged, an extremely effective shaper of that change.

Chaos reigns in the world of spreadsheets

Thanks to its relative ease of use, flexibility and low unit cost Excel has matured to become the most pervasive business tool for risk modelling, financial analysis and reporting applications. But Excel’s perceived ease of use and flexibility have become both its strengths and its weakness.

In many instances though Excel models operate outside normal governance and control mechanism, giving rise to increased risk of failures in such critical areas as valuations, assessments, premiums, trading and financial reporting.

At the other end of the scale, many enterprise risk and financial modelling services are hard coded into line of business or specialist applications. The process for defining and changing these services is complex, time consuming and expensive. Typically it impacts a range of systems and requires lengthy interactions between subject matter experts (e.g. risk analysts, financial analysts, researchers and statisticians) and IT development teams.

Often this results in:

• Poor time to market for new deals,
• higher than necessary development costs
• Less than optimum productivity

In my view the effective solution is effective spreadsheet management requires a risk framework encompassing

• spreadsheet lifecycle and content management and version control
• quality assurance, security and access control
• regulatory and corporate compliant business processes
• access to information required for reporting

..... will continue