Working in the customer insight business, it’s important that we practise what we preach; that a successful business is one that puts the customer at the very heart of their strategy and is built on serving customers well.

It’s alway good to receive feedback which shows we are doing just that!

Dave Howard, CEO said “the work we have done with Adrian and his team at Co-op shows how important it is to listen to your customers, doing more of the things that they love and value. In this case it wasn’t just about listening to the managers and their needs regarding quality and targets, NPS and CSAT scores but also the needs of the end users of the dashboards, with the development of social networks and the gamification of reward and recognition that in turn drives required agent behaviours.”

At a time when UK banking is under immense pressure – competition is increasing, regulation on easier account switching is looming and customer confidence is at an all-time low – our recent benchmarking study provides significant and valuable insight into current customer sentiment towards many of the well-known banks. A valuable study not only for the clients we already work with who are already well along the road of their Customer-Centric Transformation Programmes but also for the banking sector in general who know that their future success relies on it.

Many banks have implemented a multi-channel/ across-channel strategy but are now finding it hard to focus their efforts on making it efficient, both for the organisation (in terms of cost-to-serve) and the customer (good service experience). In the current economic climate, balancing cost to serve and service experience requires both commitment, innovative thinking and at the same time going back to basics.

We have recently published a number of headline results from our Customer Relationship Index within the UK banking sector and we are now delving deeper into the data. Here we look specifically at one of the key components of the customer service experience:

“How Easy Was It To Contact Your Bank When You Wanted?”

Our own knowledge, and indeed many other studies on Customer Experience, tells us that making it ‘easier’ for customers is a key driver of customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and in the generation of new sales. So how are UK banks measuring up?

Clearly there substantial opportunities for improvement as a number of our most popular banks are not considered ‘easy to contact’. This is for a variety of reasons, including:

• Contact details not easy to find
• Confusing IVR options
• Long hold times
• No branches local to customer
• Innability to easily contact YOUR branch directly

Don’t take our word for it; here is what customers were saying…

If we segment the data further, we then find:

• Customers in Greater London find it much harder to contact their banks. We have already written about the North/South divide on Customer Expectations in the retail sector (see It’s Better Up North). Does the same follow for the banking sector? Do customers in Greater London have higher expectations? Do they require different opening hours?
• Branch and Telephone contact are still the easiest forms of contact, with customers rating Social and Email channels the most difficult.
• In terms of the banks’ internal departments, contacting those responsible for Loans and Credit Cards was deemed to be the most difficult.
• Customers earning between £45k-£65k find it harder to contact their banks.

These are just some of the highlight findings from our research but it shows the importance of keeping differing needs of your customers in mind when developing your service model and improving your customer contact strategy. The fact is, not being ‘easy to contact’ is costing banks money in terms of customer churn, loss of sales, inability to attract new customers and damage to reputation.

From our experience in developing and implementing Customer Experience strategies in all sectors including banking, ‘ease of contact’ is inevitably a major focus of attention. However, it is safe to say that almost without exception; savings gained from improvements in efficiency more than cover the cost of implementation.

So, what can banks (and other firms) do to make it easier for their customers to contact them?

We asked bank customers to pick their channel preference for contacting their bank in the future and we can see from the pie chart on the right that phone is still the customers’ preferred method of contact, albeit marginal. Since this is the case, we have listed a few examples of areas of improvement that can make a big difference to the ‘ease of contact’ scores. They are not rocket science but surprisingly are often over-looked.

1. Make sure your contact details are easily available

Taking the leader in our benchmark, first direct, they do this very well, with a clear promise.

“You can contact us whenever you like, day or night. Your call will always be answered by a real person, and they’ll be wide awake, whatever the time.”

2. Ensure that your capacity planning in terms of front line customer facing staff accurately matches demand.

3. Consider the use of ‘QueueBuster’ technology to prevent customers having to hang-on, instead they can record their name and hang-up without losing their place in the queue. The customer ‘remains’ in the queue and receives an automatic call back at the time the call is answered, so they are connected straight to an agent.

4. Have a web-chat function available via your website (subject to over-coming identification and verification hurdles) or the facility for the customer to schedule a call back.

5. Maximise the range of transactions and information that are available to customers via self-service channels.

6. It makes sense to provide phones in branch, and with many retailers now venturing into banking services this would include providing phones in retail stores too. This allows customers the facility to call the service centre directly for both sales and service queries whilst visiting a branch or store.

The Co-operative Bank is very well placed in all aspects of our benchmark. We asked Their Customer Advocacy Manager to sum up their approach to accessibility:

“One of the key promises we make to our customers is that we are easy to do business with. Reducing customer effort and improving ‘ease of contact’ through all our contact channels are integral to delivering this promise. The benefits of doing this from our experience are threefold; benefit to our customers, our people and our members.” (Paul Schofield, Customer Advocacy Manager, The Co-operative Banking Group)

For more information on our Customer Relationship Index and our customer insight and transformation programmes please call us on 0207 492 1895.

 To set the scene, last Friday a group of 8 ladies, 13 year old sons in common, met for a ‘Girls Night Out’.  More sedate affairs these days, nights out tend to revolve around food and wine and this one was no exception.  Friday night’s venue was a local Chinese restaurant; the wine was flowing and the prawn crackers were going down well.  The conversation was as you would expect from a group of ‘young’ ladies – politics, economics, husbands, children, parents… 

The traditional mixed starters arrived and half eaten one of the ladies noticed a short coarse black hair tucked in with the chicken.  Looking around it was clear that the hair did not belong to any of the seated guests; for one, none of the ladies had short hair and secondly, most were leaning to a shade of light brunette or blonde (natural of course).  Clearly the hair must have been there before reaching the table and the ladies quietly showed it to the waitress as the plates were cleared. 

Next up, the duck / vegetarian duck pancake course.  Unfortunately, lying amongst the cucumber and spring onion, there was another similar specimen.  Feeling a little queasy at this point, the offending dish was discreetly shown to the manager along with the mention of the earlier hair too.    

The manager was aghast.  He introduced himself by name (let’s call him Fraser) apologised profusely and offered them his undivided attention for the rest of the evening, nothing would be too much trouble and he was at their disposal. The ladies smiled, accepted the apology and quietly suggested he might like to check that his chefs had their hair covered and then turned back to continue their conversation.  But, eager to make amends, Fraser went one step further and offered 20% off of the final bill. 

 Again, the ladies smiled, nodded agreement and expressed their gratitude.  Yet Fraser was still not finished and here we get to point.  Service designed to leave the customer reassured and engender loyalty and recommendation, the chance to over-deliver…

 As Fraser left the table to fetch the next course he smiled, clearly pleased with what he was going to say next, and uttered the reassuring words…

So, what’s the moral of this story (apart from “always wear a hair net when preparing food”)?  In our daily work in complaints, we often see examples of unintended consequences of trying to do (and say) the right thing.  On many occasions just saying sorry, acknowledging the issue and then doing something about it to stop it happening again is enough.  This would have been the case above.  At other times, it may be that compensation or the promise of strong action is needed.  The bottom line is that each situation and each customer is different.  In fact the only way to really tell if you have done the right thing, and that it has been interpreted the way you intended, is to ask the customer.  By systematically building a closed loop feedback system into your complaints procedure is a great way of double checking resolution.  It also ensures that your complaints strategy is delivering value through retained and repeat business and enhancing rather than destroying your brand.

Since the awards I have had a few requests for the slides that I used as part of my introductory speech (please form an orderly queue….) and, whilst I would like to think that people are wishing to be reminded of my wise words my colleagues suspect it is more to do with the Dilbert cartoon.  However, in the absence of any conclusive proof …

InsightNow have been working with organisations to set up and run customer experience programmes since 2006, adding value primarily by connecting your people with the company purpose or Brand promise.  One of the biggest changes we have seen over the years is the realisation that a focus on your people is absolutely pivotal to delivering a great experience, and commitment from the executive level down is fundamental.

There is always an element of truth behind the humour of Dilbert cartoons and back in our early days we used to encounter a number of executives in this mind-set. I am pleased to say this happens far less now. However, the need to reduce costs is still very much an item on the agenda and clearly a massive consideration. However, the difference from the cartoon above is that companies generally recognise that cutting costs through cutting people is not the answer.

I could pick from hundreds of pieces of evidence showing the value of human capital and customer experience to a business. The chart below is taken from a Global Management Accountants Association report from earlier this year. By taking this one step further and proving the link between customer experience and loyalty and the business case for our industry is clear and real. Customer Experience done well contributes to customer loyalty. It’s not rocket science and nor is it a theoretical debate.

Extent of value provided to the business?

CGMA – Rebooting Business, Valuing the Human Dimension , Jan 2012

Of course great technology to enable effortless self-service and to underpin human interaction service centres is a critical component, but in our experience the real WOW moments happen when the simplest of behaviours of your people create a truly emotional connection with your customers.  We see 100s of examples of this in our day to day work at InsightNow but I will end with a quote from a customer of a major retailer we have been working with…. Simple, moving and priceless.

However, whilst these headline figures look grave, looking deeper they are misleading and much distorted by the PPI mis-selling, which accounts for a staggering 62% of the complaints received. In fact complaints received about PPI have increased in the first half of 2012 by an overwhelming 129% from the previous 6 months. The data also takes no account of the size of the customer base of individual banks, and without it being normalised it can be skewed in favour of a sensational story.

We recently wrote about the results from Round 3 of the Navigant Complaints Survey. Here the data is normalised, making the data comparable irrespective of size, and it paints a more realistic and accurate picture. Whilst the results are not entirely good news, it does clearly show some improving trends. Click here to read more.

But what about the wider impact on customer experience and loyalty? Our recent customer experience research in the retail banking sector demonstrates that the traditional High Street banks continue to struggle in this area too and are failing to react to customer’s expectations for a more responsive, joined up and valuable customer experience. The following graph shows the gap across the sector we sampled. The customer experience score is a combined measure of a range of customer service attributes that can be thought of as a measure of ease of doing business.

However misleading the latest ‘complaints’ headlines are; it will do nothing to help restore consumer trust and confidence in those banks already under pressure. At a time when they should be putting customer experience and loyalty as a top business objective and re-connecting with their customers, the focus on redressing the PPI grievances will be a large drain on resources for the foreseeable future.

The newer “challenger” banks have the opportunity to “make hay whilst the sun shines”. With far fewer deep seated legacy problems to resolve and no trust issues to re-build, we can expect the likes of First Direct, the Co-operative Bank, Tesco, Virgin, Sainsbury’s et al to really push their customer experience credentials. Building on their strong consumer brands and a solid understanding of what good really looks like from a customer’s perspective, they have a golden opportunity to create a differentiated customer experience which the traditional High Street banks may struggle to respond to.

Often, when we speak to executives from organisations across a range of different sectors, including Banking, their response to the need for gathering and acting upon customer experience feedback is to collect complaints root cause analysis data and generate an action plan from that. In our experience this is a highly flawed Customer Experience Strategy. Whilst it can help stop organisations doing really dumb things to customers, it does very little to enable them to do more of the things that customers love and value; the things that make them want to stay, recommend and buy more.

InsightNow is delighted to be the headline sponsor of this year’s UK Customer Experience Awards. A day when Customer Experience professionals come together to recognise and celebrate the effort and commitment of those companies who deliver an outstanding customer experience, those who, from the board room down, put customers at the heart of their business.

Customer Experience Management presents one of the biggest challenges faced by organisations today but also yields the biggest opportunity. As markets continue to become commoditised and more demanding, finding a product or business differentiator is becoming increasingly hard and Customer Experience now plays a vital role in a company’s ability to deliver competitive advantage and generate income and revenue whilst at the same time reducing operational costs.

InsightNow is a Customer Insight consultancy with many years’ experience of helping leading organisations develop and implement their target Customer Experience and business strategies. We find that customer-centric organisations that have the right level of executive commitment and place customer experience as a top business objective, display unique capabilities and behaviours that sets them apart from the rest. Not only do they gain new customers but they also hang on to the ones they’ve got. It’s no secret that customer loyalty is good for your bottom line. Loyal customers not only stay with you and buy more from you, but they also talk positively about you to others. If you look at the benchmarking matrix below, taken from our 2012 Customer Relationship Index (Banking), you will see indisputable evidence of the impact that Customer Experience has on loyalty. Delving deeper, our research shows that customers of ‘Connected Performers’ hold significantly more products with their providers, are willing to purchase more products, want to remain as customers in the future and will recommend them to others. Currently only 4 out of the 13 major banks benchmarked have a positive ‘Customer Experience’ score – but only 2 really excel.

In our experience, the main reason that many customer experience strategies and programmes fail or suffer from paralysis is that firms can’t link their strategic intent to the day to day service delivery. Common stumbling blocks include:

• Lack of executive commitment
• Inadequate customer insight
• Lack of employee engagement
• Operating in silos, preventing an holistic view of the customer
• Failure to ‘join the dots’ and establish cause and effect
• Lack of focus on the customer

However, it is important to realise that it is possible to improve customer experience without multi-million pound initiatives – even the smallest of changes or investments can go a long way to making tangible differences quickly and simply. In our experience, investing in Customer Experience yields short and long term benefits.

Connected Performance from InsightNow is a range of services and tools that help organisations accelerate their strategic intent. It is a proven methodology that starts with what firms want to be as a business, for example “best loved telecommunication company” or “the most recommended insurance provider” etc. This then acts as an anchor to everything that is developed, ensuring that everyone and everything is contributing to this ultimate goal.

Connected Performance is supported by a range of tools and techniques that are designed to ensure that service delivery is

• Consistent
• Aligned to the company’s vision and mission
• Profitable
• Valued by customers and employees

In other words it’s about making sure your business delivers the intended value by identifying and removing the end-to-end service delivery blockers.

If you would like to know more about how InsightNow can help you drive improvement in customer experience or learn more about InsightNow’s Customer Relationship Index please register above to be notified when new blog posts are available, follow us on Twitter @insightnowltd and get in touch with Neil Sharp or Marcio Rodrigues on 0207 492 1895. 

The results from the recent Navigant Complaints Survey based on returns from 15 Financial Services companies’ shows some improving trends:

1. Both reportable and non-reportable complaints continue to reduce year on year although there is a marked increase in the range between the best and worst performing firms, this is most pronounced for non-reportable complaints.

2. FOS referrals are trending down which suggests that companies are becoming better equipped at resolving claims prior to escalation.

3. Redress payments are reducing and the gap is narrowing between the ranges of payments made by companies.

However it’s not all good news:

1. The average time it takes to resolve a complaint is 10 days with best practice being 4 days and the worst performing company averaging at 31 days.

2. The largest cause of complaints continues to be customer service/admin related issues which are totally under the control of each of the participating companies.

3. The focus of complaint handling continues to be compliance rather than customer experience driven with none of the participating companies using post complaint surveys to assess how their customers feel about the outcome of their complaints or the way the complaints were handled.

 The most interesting feature of the results remains the size of the variance between the different companies participating across the range of metrics. There is clearly a move towards becoming more customers focussed but the bulk of the respondents continue to handle complaints from a compliance perspective.

The move to a more customer focussed approach to complaints handling will be given a huge boost as the FSA have made some substantial changes that came into force from July 2012, the most significant being the removal of the discredited two-stage process. Under these new rules, a company’s first response will be its final response. The FSA hopes that this change will encourage companies to resolve complaints fairly when they are presented for the first time, rather than relying on a customer’s persistence – or lack thereof – when pursuing a complaint. The key operational enablers required to support this change are:

1. Empowerment of front line staff to resolve complaints at the first point of contact.

2. The ability to recognise and act on a complaint across all contact points from the unstructured social media comments through to written correspondences.

3. A focus on the systematic removal of the root causes of complaints particularly the self-inflicted which originated from customer service/admin processing.

4. Assessing complaints not as a single event but against the backdrop of the value and previous history of each customer. Whenever I have had cause to complain I am impressed by companies who recognise my value and take the trouble to look at my history and acknowledge that I am a loyal customer who doesn’t have a history of complaining!

5. Finally, viewing a complaint as an opportunity to maximise customer value and increase positive brand perception.

Arguably points 4 and 5 are the most important as they will set the tone for the way complaints are handled. Apart from the financial measures of complaints handling this will continue to be tracked using customer feedback to assess the key outcome measures of a complaint which will be invaluable to companies who aspire to be the best-in-class. The killer questions will be of the following flavour:

1. Were you completely satisfied with the way we handled your complaint?

2. As a result of the way we handled your complaint do you feel more or less positive towards remaining a customer?

3. What is the one thing we could have done to improve the quality of your complaint experience?

With this approach companies can go beyond compliance alone and can focus on important strategic benefits building their brand, improving efficiency, and ensuring that they have a future-proof system in place for the next round of regulations that the FSA/FCA decides to impose. However in many respects regulation is becoming increasingly less relevant as more and more customers turn to social media channels to give voice to their experiences. The companies that embrace complaints as an opportunity to enhance brand reputation rather than a compliance necessity will continue to set aggressive benchmarks that are beyond the art of the possible if a regulation driven complaints handling strategy is followed.

With banking very much in the spotlight and the new account switching rules looming, now is the time that banks certainly need to be putting customer experience centre stage. Whilst research from the Halifax shows that the average person in the UK has had their main bank account for more than 20 years, our own experience shows that customers are now starting to vote with their feet and are no longer remaining loyal to their first bank and are not prepared to put up with bad customer experience.

Based on insight from one of the banks we work with and who feature in the top quartile of our Customer Relationship Index (see extract chart below), the fact is that by putting their customers at the heart of their business they are experiencing a substantial increase in new account openings. Proof indeed that by placing a high focus on customer experience and having the right level of executive commitment, helps an organisation to gain new customers.

But once new customers are acquired, what about their loyalty? It’s no secret that customer loyalty is good for your bottom line. Loyal customers not only stay with you and buy more from you, but they also talk positively about you to others.

The 2012 InsightNow Customer Relationship Index (Banking) – in collaboration with social media consultancy, immediate future – provides original and valuable insight on Customer Experience and Customer Loyalty using data captured from customer satisfaction surveys as well as data from social media conversations. Social Media is now providing customers with the ultimate weapon, “real-time” & “all-the-time” sentiment as a crucial piece of the jigsaw in terms of analysing customer experience. By taking all of these three components into account, (Customer Experience, Loyalty and Social Sentiment), the InsightNow index provides a true reflection of your customer relationships.

So what drives customer loyalty in the banking sector?

I don’t think there would be any surprises to note that product performance, process quality and compliance, charges and premiums all feature but to what extent does customer experience really matter? Factors like “easy to contact”, “easy to get what you wanted”, “felt better or worse after the contact” and whether the customer was “treated fairly”, how important are they? Is there really a significant link between customer experience and customer loyalty? Well, the answer is clearly a resounding yes…

In upcoming blogs, we’ll start to examine each component in more detail, but in the meantime if you would like to know more about how InsightNow can help you drive improvement in customer experience or learn more about InsightNow’s Customer Relationship Index please register above to be notified when new blog posts are available, follow us on Twitter @insightnowltd and get in touch with Marcio Rodrigues on 0207 492 1895 or marcio.rodrigues@insightnow.co.uk

One of the best things about being in the customer insight business is analysing the data and getting to the heart of what drives a great user experience.

Recently we looked at data from a number of our clients to see if there was any linkage between customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores on a regional basis. The data included both clients that provide retail home shopping and telecommunications services.

The results showed that there was a noticeable positive bias in both scores between the regions with the North coming out on top and the South firmly propping up the bottom of the table. In fact the NP Score was a substantial 13% higher in the North Vs. the South. So the question we then asked ourselves was whether this related to the products and services provided or to customer expectations?

For our clients offering goods on-line, the key drivers for both customer satisfaction and NP Scores were:

1. Ease of purchase (web-site navigation, easy to find favourites and range of products offered)

2. Quality of goods purchased/delivered

3. Timeliness of delivery

4. Helpful and friendly delivery drivers

5. Helpful and friendly customer service staff (in the event of an incomplete/damaged delivery)

All the above attributes showed some degrees of bias with the north coming out on top. So, back to the question – is customer service better up North or are Southern customers more demanding? To try and answer this question we looked at the most significant driver of customer satisfaction and NPS, which netted out to how easy was it to use the service and get what you wanted when you wanted it. When we looked at the data this way we came to the conclusion that customer expectations rather than genuinely regional variations were predominantly responsible for the variation is scores. Why? The web-site experience was the same in Runcorn as Finchley and yet customers in the North rated this constant factor higher than those in the South. Also there was nothing about the product quality or delivery to support the regional variation. Put simply our assertion is that customers in the South of England, particularly those that live within the M25 have a more demanding lifestyle and place more reliance on home shopping than their counterparts elsewhere in the country.

So what can you do about this to improve the quality of the customer experience when the bar is set higher? The answer comes back to ease of shopping and in particular what can be done to prevent unwelcome surprises. This is my wish-list for a home shopping experience:

1. I get exactly what I have ordered or if there are substitutions I have the opportunity to agree or reject prior to dispatch – plus if more expensive substitutions are made I don’t get charged extra

2. The goods are delivered when I expect them and I receive notification say within 30 minutes of delivery

3. The driver makes sure that nothing has been damaged and places the goods where I want them

4. In the case of any damaged goods the customer service advisors are on my side and own and resolve my issues with the minimum of fuss and offer me a freebie on my next order

Customers in the South are more demanding because it’s more important to them that they get the outcome they expect. The key to great customer service is recognising different needs and developing a business model that can economically meet these needs. However, this all said, maybe people up North are just more friendly…

Novia would like to thank InsightNow  for their generous contribution that has helped us raise in excess of £12,500 for the Bath Rugby Foundation. The Bath Rugby Foundation supports disadvantaged children in the local area by using sport to motivate and inspire their development. This is a substantial sum of money and will go a long way to helping the Foundation reach their goals.

The evening was a huge success with the rain staying away long enough for a thrilling match between the Novia Financial Mallards and the Novia Investment Services Hawks with only 6 runs in it at the close of play. Nick Adendanon, Dan Hipkiss, Ross Batty and Matt Powell from Bath Rugby joined the teams whilst Bath Rugby prop and former England player David Flatman hosted the charity raffle and auction.