Tag Archive | Bank Customer Loyaty

A New Normal: Implications for Bank Customer Experience Measurement Post Pandemic – Planned Interactions

Part 2: Research Tools to Monitor Planned Interactions through the Customer Lifecycle

As we explored in an earlier post, Three Types of Customer Experiences CX Managers Must Understand, there are three types of customer interactions: Planned, Stabilizing, and Critical.

Planned interactions are intended to increase customer profitability through the customer lifecycle by engaging customers with relevant planned interactions and content in an integrated omni-channel environment.  Planned interactions will continue to grow in importance as the financial service industry shifts to an integrated digital first model.

These planned interactions are frequently triggered by changes in account usage, financial situation, family profile, etc.  CRM analytics combined with Big Data are becoming quite effective at recognizing such opportunities and prompting action toward planned interactions.  Customer experience managers should have a process to record and analyze the quality of execution of planned interactions with the objective of evaluating their effectiveness – regardless of the channel.

The key to an effective strategy for planned interactions is relevance. Triggered requests for increased engagement must be made in the context of the customer’s needs and with their permission; otherwise, the requests will come off as clumsy and annoying, and give the impression the bank is not really interested in the customer’s individual needs.  By aligning information about execution quality (cause) and customer impressions (effect), customer experience managers can build a more effective and relevant approach to planned interactions.

Research Plan for Planned Interactions

The first step in designing a research plan to test the efficacy of these planned interactions is to define the campaign.  Ask yourself, what customer interactions are planned through these layers of integrated channels.  Mapping the process will define your research objectives, allowing an informed judgment of what to measure and how to measure it.

For example, after acquisition and onboarding, assume a bank has a campaign to trigger planned interactions based on triggers from past engagement.  These planned interactions are segmented into the following phases of the customer lifecycle: engagement, growth, and retention.

Engagement Phase

Often it is instructive to think of customer experience research in terms of the bank-customer interface, employing different research tools to study the customer experience from both sides of this interface.

In our example above, management may measure the effectiveness of planned experiences in the engagement phase with the following research tools:

Customer Side Brand Side
Post-Event Surveys
 
These post-experience surveys are event-driven, where a transaction or service interaction determines if the customer is selected for a survey.  They can be performed across all channels, digital, contact center and in-person.  As the name implies, the purpose of this type of survey is to measure experience with a specific customer experience.
Employee Surveys

Ultimately, employees are at the center of the integrated customer experience model.
 
Employee surveys often measure employee satisfaction and engagement. However, there is far more value to be gleaned from employees.  We employ them to understand what is going on at the customer-employee interface by leveraging employees as a valuable and inexpensive resource of customer experience information.
 
They not only provide intelligence into the customer experience, but also evaluate the level of support within the organization, and identify perceptual gaps between management and frontline personnel.
Overall Satisfaction Surveys
 
Overall satisfaction surveys measure customer satisfaction among the general population of customers, regardless of whether or not they recently conducted a transaction.  They give managers valuable insight into overall satisfaction, engagement, image and positioning across the entire customer base, not just active customers.
Digital Delivery Channel Shopping
 
Be it a website or mobile app, digital mystery shopping allows managers of these channels to test ease of use, navigation and the overall customer experience of these digital channels.
  Transactional Mystery Shopping
 
Mystery shopping is about alignment.  It is an excellent tool to align the customer experience to the brand. Best-in-class mystery shopping answers the question: is our customer experience consistent with our brand objectives?  Historically, mystery shopping has been in the in-person channel, however we are seeing increasing mystery shopping to contact center agents.

Growth Phase

In the growth phase, we measure the effectiveness of planned experiences on both sides of the customer interface with the following research tools:

Customer Side Brand Side
Awareness Surveys
 
Awareness of the brand, its products and services, is central to planned service interactions.  Managers need to know how awareness and attitudes change as a result of these planned experiences.
Cross-Sell  Mystery Shopping
 
In these unique mystery shops, mystery shoppers are seeded into the lead/referral process.  The sales behaviors and their effectiveness are then evaluated in an outbound sales interaction.
 
These shops work very well in planned sales interactions within the contact center environment. 
Wallet Share Surveys
 
These surveys are used to evaluate customer engagement with and loyalty to the institution.  Specifically, they determine if customers consider the institution their primary provider of financial services, and identify potential road blocks to wallet share growth.
 

Retention Phase

Finally, planned experiences within the retention phase of the customer lifecycle may be monitored with the following tools:

Customer Side Brand Side
Critical Incident Technique (CIT)
 
CIT is a qualitative research methodology designed to uncover details surrounding a service encounter that a customer found particularly satisfying or dissatisfying.  This research technique identifies these common critical incidents, their impact on the customer experience, and customer engagement, giving managers an informed perspective upon which to prepare employees to recognize moments of truth, and respond in ways that will lead to positive outcomes.
Employee Surveys
 
Employees observe firsthand the relationship with the customer.  They are a valuable resource of customer experience information, and can provide a lot of context into the types of bad experiences customers frequently experience.
Lost Customer Surveys
 
Closed account surveys identify sources of run-off or churn to provide insight into improving customer retention.
Life Cycle Mystery Shopping
 
If an integrated channel approach is the objective, one should measure the customer experience in an integrated manner.
 
In lifecycle shops, shoppers interact with the bank over a period of time, across multiple touch points (digital, contact center and in-person).  This lifecycle approach provides broad and deep observations about sales and service alignment to the brand and performance throughout the customer lifecycle across all channels.
Comment Listening
 
Comment tools are not new, 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.
 

Call to Action – Make the Most of the Research

For customer experience surveys, we recommend testing the effectiveness of planned interactions by benchmarking three loyalty attitudes:

  • Would Recommend: The likelihood of the customer recommending the bank to a friend, relative or colleague.
  • Customer Advocacy: The extent to which the customer agrees with the statement, “My bank cares about me, not just the bottom line?”
  • Primary Provider: Does the customer consider the institution their primary provider for financial services?

For mystery shopping, we find linking observations to a dependent variable, such as purchase intent, identifies which sales and service behaviors drive purchase intent – informing decisions with respect to training and incentives to reinforce the sales activities which drive purchase intent.

As the integrated digital first business model accelerates, planned interactions will continue to grow in importance, and managers of the customer experience should build customer experience monitoring tools to evaluate the efficacy of these planned experiences in terms of driving desired customer attitudes and behaviors.

In the next post, we will take a look at stabilizing experiences, and their implications for customer experience research.

 

 

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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

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.

 

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Turning Customer Advocacy on Its Head

The dominate notion of customer advocacy is not very customer centric. Its focus is on what the customer can do for the bank by referring friends, relatives, and colleagues for their banking needs. A more customer centric notion, with perhaps a stronger relationship to customer loyalty, turns this dominate notion on its head – making the bank an advocate on behalf of the customer. Customers who trust their bank to do the right thing are more likely to remain loyal.

My bank cares about me not just bottom line

Measuring customer advocacy is both simple and useful; just ask your customers if they agree with the following statement: “My bank cares about me, not just the bottom line.” I call this the customer advocacy statement. Research has demonstrated a positive relationship between agreement with this statement and loyalty to a financial institution. This makes intuitive sense; customers who agree trust the bank to do right by them and will remain loyal.

Here is how we ask the question. As part of a broader survey, we ask our clients’ customers to rate, on an agreement scale, to what extent they agree with the above statement.

Research without clear call to action elements may be interesting, but not very useful. How can a manager put this question to use?

The answer to this is two fold:

First, the response to this question can be correlated to a battery of service attributes. This will yield a means of judging the relative importance of each attribute in terms of the strength of their relationship to loyalty. Mangers now have a basis to make informed decisions as to which investments will yield the most ROI in terms of improving customer loyalty.

Second, investigate all cases where agreement to this question is low. These are customers at risk. A researcher can drill into the survey responses of these customers to determine what caused the low rating. Tracking the causes will inform management of potential causes of runoff that require attention.


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