Retail
03/28/2014

Transforming Customers into Lifelong Champions—as Quickly as Possible


3-28-14-Sutherland.pngThanks to e-commerce stars like Amazon and Zappos, consumers expect exceptional, real-time customer service every time—whether they’re buying books, boots or a mortgage.

Do it right and your customers will come back again and again, even trumpet you on social media. Disappoint them or move too slowly, and they’ll rant about you to their 10,000 Twitter followers. Even if they like you, they can be quick to abandon you to sample your competitor’s cool new app.

How can you respond to customer needs at both ends of the urgency spectrum: instantly, with transactions conducted 24/7 on mobile devices, and over the long haul, ready to respond as a customer moves from college, to home buying to retirement?

Creating Loyalty for Life
Keeping customers engaged for years and less susceptible to competitors’ pitches means offering products that sync with key milestones. Those include savings and checking accounts, student loans, debit and credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, insurance, home-equity loans, child-focused savings plans for their kids, college savings plans and retirement planning.

Consider the loyalty created with first-time homebuyer programs. One example is the First Home ClubSM, a matched savings program administered by the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York. For every dollar a pre-qualified customer saves over a 10- to 24-month period, participating lenders match $4 for a one-time payment of up to $7,500 in matching funds that may be applied toward the down payment or closing costs on a home.

Technology-Driven Competitiveness
But technology is forcing banks to do much more. Those lifestyle-sensitive products must be personalized and delivered quickly and easily, says Joseph J. Buggy, senior vice president and chief strategist at Sutherland Global Services.

Witness digital-wallet and virtual-currency solutions like Isis, Bitcoin, Square, PayPal and Google Wallet. Tech-savvy young people are quicker to snap a smartphone photo of a paper check for deposit than to visit a branch.

Banks are struggling to embrace customer expectations for mobile self-help solutions, Buggy says. And yet they must move quickly, with customers adopting mobile banking five times faster than they adopted online banking back in the 1980s.

Customers want the same experience when accessing their bank, whether via personal computer or smartphone, Buggy says, and the technology is there to allow banks to offer that. Many banks, though, immersed in replacing core systems, have hesitated to invest in syncing Internet- and mobile-based platforms into a single interaction channel.

Leveraging Social Media
With Facebook boasting a billion users and Twitter many millions, engaging with new and existing customers means moving into those spaces effectively. Banks large and small are using social media to promote services, respond to customers, recruit employees and even supplement crediting decisions. Soon, customers may check balances and conduct bank transactions via social media.

Buggy advises banks to take a clear position on social media and commit only to the channel(s) the bank can staff 24/7. A static account with outbound-only communication, where you are promoting your bank but not interacting with customers, is worse than none, he says.

“It’s more forgivable, from the customer’s perspective,” Buggy adds, “to not have a Twitter handle at all than to have one and not respond quickly to it.” Particularly with Twitter, “the demographic using it expects the interaction to be close to real-time.”

Must-Have Customer Service Qualities
Banks have little choice but to meet customer demand for:

  1. 24/7 mobile access
    Banks not “open” around the clock will lose market share to whatever entities allow customers to transact business from their devices at 3 a.m.
  2. Single dashboard/single login interfaces that show the breadth of a customer’s interactions
    Credit cards, mortgages and insurance may be separate operations inside your organization, but the customer doesn’t care. She wants to reach all of her accounts from one screen.
  3. Inquiry resolution that’s quick, accurate and painless
    When communicating with you, do your customers prefer live chat, mobile apps, online self-help or social media? Are you using traditional interactive voice response (IVR), which requires the customer to type in lots of numbers when calling you on the phone, or have you moved to voice-enabled IVR, which is easier on the customer? How do your customers prefer to have complex questions or complaints resolved? Do snail mail and personal visits still have a place in your customer service strategy?

In a follow-up article, we’ll focus on finding the best ways to listen to your customers to ensure you’re serving them expertly—both in the moment and over the long term. For more information on this topic, see Sutherland’s white paper “The New Age in Customer Service.”

Niket Patankar