Loyalty & Wallet Share
Loyalty. There is almost universal agreement that it is an objective – if not the objective – of customer experience management. It is highly correlated to profitably. It lowers sales and acquisition costs per customer by amortizing these costs across a longer lifetime – leading to extraordinary financial results. In retail banking a 5% increase in loyalty translates to an 85% increase in profits.
Loyalty is Emotion Driven
Banks often see themselves as transaction driven; delivery channels are evaluated on their cost per transaction. As a result, there is a lot of attention given to and investment in automated channels which reduce transaction costs and at the same time offer more convenience to customers. Win-win, right? The bank drives costs out of the transaction and customers get the convenience of performing a variety of transactions untethered by time or space. However, while transaction costs and convenience are important, loyalty is often driven by an emotional connection with the institution. An emotional connection fostered by interaction with actual employees at moments of need for the customers –moments with a high level of emotional importance to the customer – moments of truth.
Moments of truth are atypical events, where customers experience a high emotional energy in the outcome (such a lost credit card, loan application, or investment advice). In one study published in McKinsey Quarterly, positive experiences during moments of truth led to more than 85% of customers increasing wallet share by purchasing more products or investing more of their assets (Beaujean et al 06)
Impersonal alternative channels lack the ability to bind the customer to the institution. It’s the people. Effective handling of moments of truth requires frontline staff with the emotional tools or intelligence to recognize the emotional needs of the customer and bind them to the institution.
The Human Element: Sales and Service, Bank’s Last Link in the Marketing Chain
What if I told you that after all your efforts with marketing (product, positioning and price), there is a one-in-ten chance the branch representatives will undermine the sale?
Now more than ever, it is critical for banks to establish themselves as the primary provider of financial services, not only for deposit accounts but across a variety of financial products and services. Increasing the average products per customer will require a strategic approach to both product design and marketing. However, at the end of this strategic marketing process, there is the human element, where prospective customers must interact with bank employees to complete the sales process.
As part of our services to our clients, Kinesis tracks purchase intent as a result of in-branch sales presentations. According to our research, 10% of in-branch sales presentations observed by mystery shoppers, result in negative purchase intent.
What do these 10% failed sales presentations look like?
Here are some quotes describing the experience:
“There was no personal attention. The banker did not seem to care if I was there or not. At the teller line, there was only one teller that seemed to care that there were several people waiting. No one moved with a sense of urgency. There was no communication materials provided.”
Here’s another example…
“It was painfully obvious that the banker was lacking basic knowledge of the accounts.”
Yet another…
“Brian did not give the impression that he wanted my business. He did not stand up and shake my hand when I went over to his desk. He very rarely made eye contact. I felt like he was just going through the motions. He did not ask for my name or address me by my name. He told me about checking account products but failed to inquire about my situation or determine what needs I have or might have in the future. He did not wrap up the recommendation by going over everything nor did he ask for my business. He did not thank me for coming in.”
In contrast, here is what the shops with positive intent look like:
“The appearance of the bank was comfortable and very busy in a good way. The customers were getting tended to and the associates had the customers’ best interests in mind. The response time was amazing and I felt as if the associate was sincere about wanting me as a customer, but he was not pushy or demanding about it.”
Now…after all the effort and expense of a strategic cross-sell strategy, which of the above experiences do you want your customers to encounter?
Would it be acceptable to you as a marketer to at the end of a strategic marketing campaign, have 10% of the sales presentations undermine its success?
These are rhetorical questions.
Time and time again, in study after study, we consistently observe that purchase intent is driven by two dimensions of the customer experience: reliability and empathy. Customers want bankers who care about them and their needs and have the ability to satisfy those needs. Specifically, our research suggests the following behaviors are strongly related to purchase intent:
- Friendly/Smile/Courteous
- Greeting/Stand to Greet/Acknowledge Wait
- Interest in Helping/Offer Assistance
- Discuss Benefits/Solutions
- Promised Services Get Done
- Accuracy
- Professionalism
- Express Appreciation/Gracious
- Personalized Comment (such as, How are you?)
- Listen Attentively/Undivided Attention
As part of any strategic marketing campaign to both bring in new customers as well as increase wallet share of existing customers, it is incumbent on the institution to install appropriate customer experience training, sales and service monitoring, linked with incentives and rewards structures to motivate sales and service behaviors which drive purchase intent.
The Customer Loyalty Illusion
There is no such thing as customer loyalty. Loyalty…true loyalty… loyalty through thick and thin – requires an irrational customer, one who will stay with the bank regardless of the bank’s performance.
Every time a customer interacts with their bank, they may learn something as a result of the experience, and adjust their behavior as a result of what they learn. What we perceive as loyalty is an illusion, rather it is actually the product of an ongoing calculation each customer makes conscious or subconsciously to either initiate or maintain a relationship with a bank. This is the customer value equation.
The customer value equation is simply the sum of the benefits of banking with a given institution minus the sum of the costs of choosing another provider. If this sum is positive, the customer will act as if they are loyal. If this sum is negative, the customer will behave as if they are disloyal.
The first term in this equation contains all the possible benefits associated with the bank. These include the obvious, such as convenience of location or hours, rates and fees, breadth of delivery channels, and customer service. However, they also include less obvious intangible benefits, such as doing business with a local community bank, or the prestige of one financial service provider over the other.
The second term contains the sum of all the costs associated with the banking relationship. Again, the obvious are rates and fees. However, there may be other acquisition costs, such as, the effort of switching providers, as well as intangible costs such as potential risk of switching financial providers. These intangible costs are significant, and play a significant role in what we perceive as customer loyalty, where customers remain with a financial institution more out of inertia, than other reasons.
A common objection to the customer value equation as a model of customer decision making is that it assumes that all customer decisions are completely rational, something that flies in the face of modern research using fMRI machines to probe the biological underpinning of decision makings. This research strongly suggests that many decisions are neither conscious nor rational. However, the customer value equation model allows for this equation to be subconscious and the intangible terms on both the cost and benefit side of the equation allow for irrational benefits and costs to be inserted into the customer’s decision making.
The proposition that customers are not loyal, and that behaviors we use to describe loyalty are really the result of an ongoing calculation of benefits and costs at first may seem daunting, but embracing the proposition that customers adjust their behavior based on what they perceive about a provider, gives managers a valuable model to think about customer loyalty in ways that mirror customer decision making. Understanding the customer value equation gives bank managers a rational framework to make investments in product, positioning, price and place to best match their offering with their customers’ value equations.
How might banks use the concept of the customer value equation to manage the customer experience?
Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design: Customer Surveys
Many banks conduct periodic customer satisfaction research to assess the opinions and experiences of their customer base. While this information can be useful, it tends to be very broad in scope, offering little practical information to the front-line. A best practice is a more targeted, event-driven approach collecting feedback from customers about specific service encounters soon after the interaction occurs.
These surveys can be performed using a variety of data collection methodologies, including e-mail, phone, point-of-sale invite, web intercept, in-person intercept and even US mail. Fielding surveys using e-mail methodology with its immediacy and relatively low cost, offers the most potential for return on investment. Historically, there have been legitimate concerns about the representativeness of sample selection using email. However, as the incidence of email collection of banks increases, there is less concern about sample selection bias.
The process for fielding such surveys is fairly simple. On a daily basis, a data file (in research parlance “sample”) is generated containing the customers who have completed a service interaction across any channel. This data file should be deduped, cleaned against a do not contact list, and cleaned against customers who have been surveyed recently (typically three months depending on the channel). At this point, if you were to send the survey invitations, the bank would quickly exhaust the sample, potentially running out of eligible customers for future surveys. To avoid this, a target of the required number of completed surveys should be set per business unit, and a random selection process employed to select just enough customers to reach this target without surveying every customer. [1]
So what are some of the purposes banks use these surveys for? Generally, they fall into a number of broad categories:
Post-Transaction: Teller & Contact Center: Post-transaction surveys are event-driven, where a transaction or service interaction determines if the customer is selected for a survey, targeting specific customers shortly after a service interaction. As the name implies, the purpose of this type of survey is to measure satisfaction with a specific transaction.
New Account & On-Boarding: New account surveys measure satisfaction with the account opening process, as well as determine the reasons behind new customers’ selection of the bank for a new deposit account or loan – providing valuable insight into new customer identification and acquisition.
Closed Account Surveys: Closed account surveys identify sources of run-off or churn to provide insight into improving customer retention.
Call to Action
Research without a call to action may be informative, but not very useful. Call to action elements should be built into research design, which provide a road map for clients to maximize the ROI on customer experience measurement.
Finally, post-transaction surveys support other behavioral research tools. Properly designed surveys yield insight into customer expectations, which provide an opportunity for a learning feedback loop to support observational research, such as mystery shopping, where customer expectations are used to inform service standards which are in turn measured through mystery shopping.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links:
- Introduction: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Mystery Shopping: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Leverage Unrecognized Experts in the Customer Experience: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Employee Surveys
- Filling in the White Spaces: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Social Listening
- A New Look at Comment Cards: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Customer Comments & Feedback
- Customer Experience Measurement Implications of Changing Branch Networks
[1] Kinesis uses an algorithm which factors in the targeted quota, response rate, remaining days in the month and number of surveys completed to select just enough customers to reach the quota without exhausting the sample.
Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design: Mystery Shopping
“You can expect what you inspect.”
This management philosophy is as true today as it was 50 years ago when W. Edwards Deming used it. Mystery shopping is more than a pure measurement technique conducted properly; it is an excellent motivational tool to motivate appropriate sales and service behaviors across all bank delivery channels.
Unlike the various customer feedback tools designed to inform managers about how customers feel about the bank, mystery shopping focuses on the behavioral side of the equation, answering the question: are our employees exhibiting appropriate sales and service behaviors?
It is the employees who animate the brand, and it is imperative that employee sales and service behaviors be aligned with the brand promise. Actions speak louder than words. Brands spend millions of dollars on external messaging to define an emotional connection with the customer. However, when a customer perceives a disconnect between an employee representing the brand and external messaging, they almost certainly will experience brand ambiguity. The result severely undermines these investments, not only for the customer in question, but their entire social network. In today’s increasingly connected world, one bad experience could be shared hundreds if not thousands of times over. Mystery shopping is an excellent tool to align sales and service behaviors to the brand.
So…what behaviors, channels and employees should be shopped?
Sales channels and sales behaviors offer the most ROI relative to other types of shopping. In terms of prioritizing mystery shopping resources, shops of sales channels and sale behaviors should be the first priority. With the increasing use of universal associates and transforming tellers into sellers, it is incumbent on managers to measure and motivate these higher level sales skills, in both branches and contact centers. After sales behaviors have been prioritized, if resources remain for mystery shopping service scenarios can be included in the mix.
As for the specific measurements, the best practice for mystery shop design is to focus on empirically measureable employee behaviors captured with objective questions. (Was a specific behavior present or not?…Yes or no). The best methodology for deciding which questions to ask is to start with your brand promise, and determine which sales and service behaviors animate the brand. Once you have developed a list of expected behaviors, the next step is to map each behavior to a specific question. Avoid compound questions which ask about two different behaviors, unless you expect both behaviors to be present at the same time, and you are not worried about distinguishing if one is present without the other.
For more information about a process to align behaviors to the brand, click here: “5 Steps to Make Frontline Employees Authentic Representatives of the Brand”
Open-ended questions, either in narrative form or qualitatively asking what shoppers liked or disliked about the experience, add valuable context for understanding the customer experience. Many clients consider these qualitative observations the heart of the shop.
While the core of the mystery shop is objective measurements of specific behaviors, there is a place for subjective impressions. Rating scales are used to capture shopper impressions of various dimensions of the customer experience, as well as the overall experience itself. These subjective ratings provide valuable context for interpreting the customer experience, and specifically the efficacy of the objective behaviors measured. For example, purchase intent ratings calculate a correlation between the objective behaviors measured and purchase intent, identifying which behaviors may be more important in terms of driving purchase intent, and which investments in training, incentives and rewards have the most potential for ROI.
Finally, given mystery shopping measures employee behaviors against bank service standards, it is a best practice to calibrate and align service standards with customer expectations by constantly feeding information uncovered with the customer surveys back into the service standards and mystery shopping. Such an informed feedback loop between customer surveys and mystery shopping will ensure the behaviors measured are aligned with customer expectations.
Call to Action
Research without a call to action may be informative, but not very useful. Call to action elements should be built into research design, which provide a road map for clients to maximize the ROI on customer experience measurement.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links:
- Introduction: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Customer Surveys: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Leverage Unrecognized Experts in the Customer Experience: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Employee Surveys
- Filling in the White Spaces: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Social Listening
- A New Look at Comment Cards: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Customer Comments & Feedback
- Customer Experience Measurement Implications of Changing Branch Networks
Leverage Unrecognized Experts in the Customer Experience: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Employee Surveys
Frontline customer facing employees (tellers, platform, and contact center agents) are a vastly underutilized resource in terms of understanding the customer experience. They spend the majority of their time in the customer-bank interface, and as a result tend to be unrecognized experts in the customer experience.
An excellent tool to both leverage this frontline experience and identify any perceptual gaps between management and the frontline is to survey all levels of the organization to gather impressions of the customer experience. This survey can be fielded very efficiently with an online survey.
Typically, we start by asking employees to put themselves in the customers’ shoes and to ask how customers would rate their satisfaction with the customer experience, including specific dimensions and attributes of the experience. A key call-to-action element of these surveys tends to be a question asking employees what they think customers most like or dislike about the service delivery.
Next we focus employees on their own experience, asking the extent to which they believe they have all the tools, training, processes, policies, customer information, coaching, staff levels, empowerment, and support of both their immediate supervisor and senior management to deliver on the company’s service promise. Call-to-action elements can be designed into this portion of the research by asking what, in their experience, leads to customer frustration or disappointment, and soliciting suggestions for improvement. Perhaps most interesting, we ask what are some of the strategies the employee uses to make customers happy. This is an excellent source for identifying best practices and potential coaches.
Finally, comparing results across the organization identifies any perceptual gaps between the frontline and management. This can be a very illuminating activity.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links:
- Introduction: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Customer Surveys: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Mystery Shopping: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Filling in the White Spaces: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Social Listening
- A New Look at Comment Cards: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Customer Comments & Feedback
- Customer Experience Measurement Implications of Changing Branch Networks
A New Look at Comment Cards: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Customer Comments & Feedback
Customer comment tools provide financial institutions a valuable tool to identify and reply to customers who have had a negative service experience and may be at risk for attrition or spreading negative word of mouth.
Beyond randomly surveying customers who have recently conducted a service interaction at a branch or call center, banks should also provide an avenue for self-selected customer feedback, feedback from customers who have not been selected to participate in a survey, but want to comment on the experience.
In the past, this vehicle for collecting this unsolicited feedback would be the good old fashioned comment card. Today, the Internet offers a much more efficient means of collecting this feedback. For the branch channel, invitations to provide feedback with a URL to an online comment form can be printed on transaction receipts. For call centers, customers can be directed to IVR systems to capture voice feedback from customers. Website and mobile users can be offered online comment forms as well.
Unsolicited feedback tools are not surveys, and should not be used as surveys. In fact, they make terrible customer satisfaction surveys. Many institutions try to turn them into surveys by asking customers to rate such things as service, convenience and product selection. But these comment channels do not give reliable information because they do not come from typical customers. The people who fill out the cards tend to fall into one of four groups:
- Extremely happy customers
- Extremely unhappy customers
- Extremely bored customers
- Customers with requests (for products, new store locations, etc.)
Notice the operative word in the first three categories: extreme. If a customer is satisfied with the product or service, why bother to give feedback? Customers expect to be satisfied. Having your expectations met is not something to write about. In research parlance, the sample is self-selected, and the people who provide such feedback are not likely to be representative of the general population of customers. It therefore makes no sense to ask these people to provide ratings that are going to be tabulated and averaged. The results will be useless at best and completely misleading at worst.
A better approach is to design them as letters to the bank president. They look something like,
“Dear [President’s name]:
Here is something I would like you to know . . .
[Lots of white space]
Sincerely yours,”
[Space for name, address and phone number]
Additionally, the check box can be included asking the customer if they would like someone to contact them as a result of their feedback.
This type of feedback tool will deliver valuable qualitative data about the experience that prompted the customer to provide the feedback.
It is essential that a system for analyzing and responding to the feedback be put into place. First, sort the comments according to if the customer wants a reply to their feedback. There are ways to streamline this process, but to ignore it is to make matters worse, because customers (the angry ones, at least) will expect a reply. On the other hand, responding to customer concerns makes comment tools exceptionally valuable. First, they provide a method to identify and reply to customers who have had a negative service experience and may be at risk for attrition or undermine the brand with negative word of mouth, and even worse social media commentary. Second, they Minimize negative word-of-mouth advertising that would undermine marketing efforts; and increase positive word-of-mouth advertising (customers who have had a problem fixed are famous for becoming vocal advocates of a company). The flip-side is that customers who have had a positive experience can be thanked for their feedback, which encourages customer loyalty.
The next step in acting on the qualitative feedback is to reduce it into quantifiable themes through the process of coding, where comments are grouped by theme. For instance, 18% of comments may have referred to “slow service” and 14% to “lack of job knowledge”. Now, we can monitor the frequency of various themes by business unit and over time.
Comment tools are not new, but with modern technology can be employed as a valuable feedback tool to identify at risk customers and mitigate the causes of their dissatisfaction.
Finally, the unsolicited nature of customer comments offer a unique opportunity to feed themes identified in customer comments back into customer survey design, allowing managers to determine if issues uncovered are broadly present across all customers.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links:
- Introduction: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Customer Surveys: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Mystery Shopping: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Leverage Unrecognized Experts in the Customer Experience: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Employee Surveys
- Filling in the White Spaces: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Social Listening
- Customer Experience Measurement Implications of Changing Branch Networks
Customer Experience Measurement Implications of Changing Branch Networks
The branch network is evolving based on banking’s changing economic model as well as changing customer expectations and behaviors. As the branch network evolves measurement of the customer experience within the branch channel will need to evolve as well to fit both the changing economic model and customer behaviors.
Deb Stewart’s recent article “The Branch Shrinks” in the June 2014 edition of ABA Bank Marketing and Sales used the experience of Sweden as an example of how the branch operating model in the US may evolve in response to these changes. Ms. Stewart describes Sweden’s branch operating model’s evolution in four primary ways:
- Branches will be less monolithic, with branches tailored to location and market;
- Branches will be much smaller and more flexible;
- Customer facing technology will be more prevalent; and
- Branch staffing both decline and change with increased use of “universal” associates who will conduct a wider range of functions, transforming tellers to sellers.
The article goes on to describe five case studies for innovative branch design in the United States.
Most commentary suggests branch networks will be redefined in three primary ways:
- Flagship Branches: Hubs to a hub and spoke model offering education, advice, and serving as sales centers.
- Community Centers: Branches smaller in scope focused on community outreach driving loyalty.
- Expanded ATMs: These will serve as transaction centers at in-store or other high traffic sites.
In short, there will be a variety of branch types, many staffed with fewer employees, each with a unique role, presenting three customer experience challenges:
- Consistently delivering on the brand promises despite disparate branch types – Does the customer experience reinforce the overall brand promise?
- Fidelity to each branch’s unique role within network – Does the customer experience fit the specific role and objectives of the branch?
- Huge challenges associated with a transformation of skills to universal associates – How do we conduct a massive transition of skills of tellers into financial advisors, fluent in all bank products, and manage these associates fewer less employees on site.
Flagship Branches
The customer experience at flagship branches will best be measured much like it is at traditional branches today with a mix of customer satisfaction surveys and mystery shopping. A random sampling across all interaction types will ensure that all of the services offered at these education and sales centers are evaluated. Mystery shopping should focus scenarios on sales scenarios across all retail product lines, evaluating sales effectiveness, quality of experience and compliance.
Community Centers
Community Center branches offer the greatest need to refine customer experience measurement, and opportunity to use it as a management tool. Universal associates, with broad skill requirements working in lightly staffed branches, mandate that the customer experience be monitored closely. Post-transaction surveys across all interaction types should be used to evaluate employee skill level, appropriate resolution of inquiry, and consistency of service with brand promise. An automated email or mobile survey will provide managers with a near real time view of the customer experience at fraction of the cost of other data collection methods. Mystery shopping across a broad range of scenarios will evaluate employee skill level and appropriate referral practices for mortgage and investment services to Flagship branches or Video Bankers. Fewer employees will allow for better tracking of the customer experience at the employee level, which will be a necessity given the increased expectations on these employees with less onsite management.
Expanded ATMs
As with the other branch types, a random sampling of all interaction types will yield a valid sample of transactions these branches perform. As with the other branch types, automated email or mobile surveys will provide a near real time view of the experience. Mystery shopping may be used to evaluate service interactions with video tellers, investment advisors or tellers.
Evolution of the branch network, particularly with changes in the staffing model, will require changes in how the customer experience is monitored. The good news is survey technology is evolving as well, and will give managers the opportunity to gather intelligence on the customer experience in a highly efficient and productive manner.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links:
- Introduction: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Customer Surveys: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Mystery Shopping: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
- Leverage Unrecognized Experts in the Customer Experience: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Employee Surveys
- Filling in the White Spaces: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Social Listening
- A New Look at Comment Cards: Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design – Customer Comments & Feedback
Drivers of Purchase Intent in the Contact Center Experience in Retail Banking
What impresses customers positively as a result of a call to your call center?
To answer this question, Kinesis conducted research into the efficacy of the bank contact center sales process by observing a battery of sales and service behaviors through the use of mystery shoppers. The objective of this study was to identify which sales and service behaviors drive purchase intent. (See the insert below for a description of the methodology).
The table at the end of this post shows the relative frequency in which each behavior was observed in shops where the shopper reported positive purchase intent as a result of the call, compared to shops with negative purchase intent.
The seven behaviors with the strongest relationship to purchase intent are:
- Invite to visit a branch
- If on hold, thank for waiting
- Express appreciation for interest/thank for business
- Offer further assistance
- Mention/refer to website
- Listen attentively to your needs
- Offer to send material
Each of these behaviors is at least three times more likely to be present in shops with positive purchase intent compared to those with negative purchase intent.
Two observations jump out from this first group of behaviors:
First, integration of other channels into the sales process appears to drive purchase intent. Inviting the shopper to visit a branch was observed 6.4 times more frequently in shops with positive purchase intent compared to negative. The branch still has a role in the sales process; other research consistently points to the convenience of branch location as a driver of selection of a primary financial institution. If contact centers leverage the branch during the sales process, they have a significantly better chance to advance the sale. Additionally, when the agent incorporated the website into the sales presentation, they also have a better chance of advancing the sale. Mentioning the website was 3.3 times more likely to be present in shops with positive purchase intent compared to negative.
Secondly, the balance of these key behaviors all revolve around personal attention (thank for waiting on hold, offing further assistance, listening attentively, offer to send material) and interest in the customer’s business (express appreciation or thank for business).
Nine more behaviors were at least twice as likely to be present in shops with positive purchase intent:
- Product knowledge
- Ask for name
- Ask for your business/close the sale
- If on hold, check back in 1 minute
- When thanked respond graciously
- Ask probing questions
- Explanations easy to understand
- Explain the value of banking with bank
- Thank for calling
The themes most common in this second group of behaviors that appear to influence purchase intent are competence (product knowledge, easy to understand explanations), personal attention (asking name, checking back on hold, probing of needs) and interest in the customer’s business (ask for business, express value, thank for calling).
So…what drives purchase intent as a result of a call to a contact center? Integrating other channels into the conversation, and sincerely expressing interest in the customer broadly drive purchase intent.
Frequency Behavior Observed in Shops with Increased and Decreased Purchase Intent:
| Increased | Decreased | |
| Invite to visit a branch | 64% | 10% |
| If on hold, thanked for waiting | 97% | 20% |
| Express appreciation for interest / thank you for business | 92% | 20% |
| Offer further assistance | 85% | 25% |
| Mention/refer to website | 66% | 20% |
| Listen attentively to your needs | 80% | 25% |
| Offer to send material | 97% | 31% |
| Product knowledge | 98% | 35% |
| Ask for name | 68% | 25% |
| Ask for your business/close the sale | 76% | 32% |
| If on hold, check back in 1 minute | 94% | 40% |
| When thanked respond graciously | 98% | 42% |
| Ask probing questions | 94% | 42% |
| Explanations easy to understand | 99% | 45% |
| Explain the value of banking with bank | 88% | 43% |
| Thank for calling | 99% | 50% |
| Friendly demeanor / pleasant voice | 100% | 60% |
| Clear Greeting | 95% | 60% |
| Avoid bank jargon | 98% | 68% |
| Use name | 96% | 67% |
| Mention other bank product | 99% | 75% |
| Good pace | 98% | 75% |
| Wait for response before placed on hold | 100% | 80% |
| Demonstrate understanding of question | 100% | 81% |
| Answered in 3 rings | 99% | 88% |
| Speak clearly | 99% | 88% |
| Professional Greeting | 98% | 89% |
| Avoid interrupting | 100% | 95% |
Methodology
To evaluate the state of the in-branch sales process, Kinesis mystery shopped five banks with significant North American footprints. Among the objectives of the study were to:
1) Define the sales process among different institutions.
2) Evaluate the effectiveness of specific sales behaviors.
Shoppers were asked a mixture of closed-ended questions to evaluate the presence or frequency of specific behaviors, and open-ended questions to gather the qualitative impressions of these behaviors on the shoppers – in short the how and why behind how the shopper felt. Finally, to provide a basis to evaluate the effectiveness of each sales behavior, shoppers were asked to rate their purchase intent as a result of the visit. This purchase intent rating was then used as a means of evaluating what behaviors tend to be present when positive purchase intent is reported as opposed to negative purchase intent.
Kinesis CEM 
Best Practices in Bank Customer Experience Measurement Design
The question was simple enough… If you owned customer experience measurement for one of your bank clients, what would you do?
Through the years, I developed a point of view of how to best measure the customer experience, and shared it with a number of clients, however, never put it down to writing.
So here it is…
Best practices in customer experience measurement use multiple inputs in a coordinated fashion to give managers a 360-degree view of the customer experience. Just like tools in a tool box, different research methodologies have different uses for specific needs. It is not a best practice to use a hammer to drive a screw, nor the butt end of a screwdriver to pound a nail. Each tool is designed for a specific purpose, but used in concert can build a house. The same is true for research tools. Individually they are designed for specific purposes, but used in concert they can help build a more whole and complex structure.
Generally, Kinesis believes in measuring the customer experience with three broad classifications of research methodologies, each providing a unique perspective:
These research methodologies are employed in concert to build a 360-degree view of the customer experience.
The key to building a 360-degree view of the customer experience is to understand the bank-customer interface. At the center of the customer experience are the various channels which form the interface between the customer and institution. Together these channels define the brand more than any external messaging. Best in class customer experience research programs monitor this interface from multiple directions across all channels to form a comprehensive view of the customer experience.
Customer and front-line employees are the two stakeholders who interact most commonly with each other in the customer-institution interface. As a result, a best practice in understanding this interface is to monitor it directly from each direction.
Tools to measure the experience from the customer side of interface include:
Post-Transaction Surveys: Post-transaction surveys provide intelligence from the other side of customer-employee interface. These surveys are targeted, event-driven, collecting feedback from customers about specific service encounters soon after the interaction occurs. They provide valuable insight into both customer impressions of the customer experience, and if properly designed, insight into customer expectations. This creates a learning feedback loop, where customer expectations can be used to inform service standards measured through mystery shopping. Thus two different research tools can be used to inform each other. Click here for a broader discussion of post-transaction surveys.
Customer Comments: Beyond surveying customers who have recently conducted a service interaction, a best practice is to provide an avenue for customers who want to comment on the experience. Comment tools are not new (in the past they were the good old fashioned comment card), but with modern Internet-based technology they can be used as a valuable feedback tool to identify at risk customers and mitigate the causes of their dissatisfaction. Additionally, comment tools can be used to inform the post transaction surveys. If common themes develop in customer comments, they can be added to the post-transaction surveys for a more scientific measurement of the issue. Click here for a broader discussion of comment tools.
Social Monitoring: Increasingly social media is “the media”; prospective customers assign far more weight to social media then any external messaging. A social listening system that analyzes and responds to social indirect feedback is increasingly becoming essential. As with comment tools, social listening can be used to inform the post transaction surveys. Click here for a broader discussion of social listening tools.
Directing our attention to the bank side of the interface, tools to measure the experience from the bank side of bank-customer interface include:
Mystery Shopping: In today’s increasing connected world, one bad experience could be shared hundreds if not thousands of times over. As in-person delivery models shift to a universal associate model with the branch serving as more of a sales center, monitoring and motivating selling skills is becoming increasingly essential. Mystery shopping is an excellent tool to align sales and service behaviors to the brand. Unlike the various customer feedback tools designed to inform managers about how customers feel about the bank, mystery shopping focuses on the behavioral side of the equation, answering the question: are our employees exhibiting appropriate sales and service behaviors? Click here for a broader discussion of mystery shopping tools.
Employee Surveys: Employee surveys often measure employee satisfaction and engagement. However, in terms of understanding the customer experience, a best practice is to move employee surveys beyond employee engagement and to understand what is going on at the customer-employee interface by leveraging employees as a valuable and inexpensive resource of customer experience information. This information comes directly out one side of the customer-employee interface, and provides not only intelligence into the customer experience, but also evaluates the level of support within the organization, solicit recommendations, and compares perceptions by position (frontline vs. management) to identify perceptual gaps which typically exist within organizations. Click here for a broader discussion of employee surveys.
For more posts in this series, click on the following links: