Saturday, August 22, 2009

Customer Oriented Banking

I have had a bad experience with customer service of one of the large private bank last week. My netbanking id was locked as I didn't use it for past more than 3 months. When I approached their phone banking support to get it unlocked, they advised me to raise support ticket via web service request form. I did the same promptly as I wanted to transfer funds urgently to my some other accounts. They took 5 days to unlock my id. I missed my deadline to transfer the fund.

I am a loyal customer of this bank for more than 4 years now. I am also one of their premium customer and hold more than 4 products from the same bank. However when I submitted support request, they treated my request on the same priority as that of a non premium customer. I was expecting quick turnaround and differentiated service level, being a premium customer of bank. It didn't happen. Today I have decided to move to other bank. I am sure this bank must be losing lots of such customer in a year. This bank is known to be one of the most technology savvy bank in India, but unfortunately they do not use any system which helps them differentiate their premium customers from non premium customers. There are several advanced analytics solutions available in market which can help bank address such problems/challenges proactively. I have seen banks spending lots efforts and money on marketing campaigns to retain their premium customers when they are leaving. But if they invest in analytics systems then they can save lots of money on such marketing spend.

Similarly where a new loan to a non premium customer is given in say 3-4 days, can the same be given to a premium customer in just 1-2 days ? I had to wait for 4 working days to avail an Auto Loan last year through the same bank where I was a premium customer.

Some years ago banks were focussing on acquiring customers and quality of customer was not given lot of importance. In today's economic condition, you need to improve quality of new customers. You would like to increase wallet share per customer and at the same time you want to retain only those customers which are profitable to your organizations. Analytical solutions can help address all of such requirements. To survive in this competitive market conditions, we need to address the following questions pro-actively

1. Am I acquiring good customers?

2. Am I spending my marketing budget in right direction to increase wallet share per customer?

3. Do I know my most profitable customers? What am I doing to retain them?

4. Do I know my non profitable customers? What am I doing to terminate them?

5. Can I expediate the process of giving loans to the most profitable customers ?

Typically in banking when you submit any web request, it goes into queue. CRM system automatically routes your request basis information available in subject line of your request. Lots of time subject line is incorrect and that results in routing of a request to wrong customer support group. The request gets re-assigned to right group and then they start working on it. This is very tedious and time consuming process. Lot of precious time is lost in a assigning request to right support group. This can be avoided by implementing text analytics solutions. Text analytics solution can help you route the request based on text in the web form. If customer id is available in web form then it can also identify whether a particular customer is premium customer or non premium customer. Accordingly it can route it to queue dedicated to the premium customers.

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