Comments On behalf of Prelini Udayan
Yesterday Adobe hosted an interactive webinar on Customer Engagement in the Digital Age. We were fortunate to have representation from both Barclays and Standard Chartered Bank – Martin Baker, Head of Retail Planning at Barclays and Natasha Davydova, Head of Strategy for Technology and Operations at Standard Chartered – along with Adobe’s MD for Northern Europe, Alan Banks and moderator, Tom Berry (Bite communications).
The discussion ranged across many topics related to customer engagement including the importance of the customer experience; establishing a point of differentiation in banking; service delivery in banking compared to other sectors; and whether innovation really exists in financial services today.
All panellists agreed that the customer experience was now the key point of differentiation in retail banking, why?
Banking customers are more empowered that ever before – thanks to the web and social media – and know what they want from their banks today. Challenging banks to keep up if they want to deliver value to customers. Meanwhile, the industry has become more competitive. New entrants are challenging high street banks with their ability to be to more agile, better utilise customer data and offer more innovative interactions i.e. web and video
The industry has never been more transparent. Customers now have the ability to compare best interest rates and offers on a daily basis, meaning product pricing is no longer a sustainable point of differentiation. Personal recommendations are driving customers to churn and people make banking recommendations to friends and family based on great experiences not great prices.
Natasha talked about how good customer experience was about seamless experiences across all channels, backed by a personalised service built on deep customer knowledge. With Martin commenting it was about building long term relationships that start at the point of customer on-boarding. Getting it wrong at the beginning could have detrimental effects in the long term.
Delivering a great customer experience required a combination of the right culture and technology. More specifically, a culture of customer-centricity and the right technology to deliver a consistent service across all channels. Further, splitting production from distribution could help by allowing a bank to focus on simplifying the back-end processes while investing in front-end processes to create a point of differentiation.
Alan spoke about how technology could be deployed to make all parts of the customer livecycle simpler and more engaging, from interactive forms at on-boarding, through better online user experiences, to self-service and video conferencing in branches. Investment banks such as Morgan Stanley <http://www.euromoneyfix.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=2394675> are already leading the way.
The great thing about the debate was its interactivity, with many questions coming in live via the webinar and tweets and the audience participating in a series of live polling questions.
The polls determined that the biggest barriers to improving the customer experience were:
1. Decline in consumer trust
2. Lack of financial resource
3. Other
And the top technology priorities for banks today were:
1. Mobile banking
2. Online banking
3. Self-service
A high quality streaming version will be available in the coming days.
Prelini.