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How often do you only look at company-generated marketing material when making a significant purchase decision? If you’re like most of us, you use multiple sources, including referrals, reviews, magazines and experiences of others before making decisions about what you buy and who you buy from.

This means that financial services companies are no longer in control of information that is circulated about their organisation. This change in the customers’ information sources is only one example of the dramatically different business landscape that banks operate in today.

A shift has occurred in the way that customers make their decisions, from trusting companies to using online consumer-generated information. Customer location has also changed, from primarily local to global, and service delivery has moved from purely in-sourced to a multi-outsourced model affecting suppliers and business processes.

Virtually every aspect of the way banks operate has changed over the last five years. Banks are now struggling to catch up and reinvent their own models to address the new networked consumer they must deal with.

Although banks have spent time, money and energy addressing the changes enabled by the IT revolution in supply chain, online-banking and vendor outsourcing, one area left untouched is addressing the changes in the way customers make decisions.

This is particularly obvious in how banks fail to address the conversations that customers have with each other. Try an internet search on the word “hate” next to any financial institution and watch what comes up. By ignoring these conversations, banks are finding that customers go elsewhere for information. By the time they arrive to do business, they are armed with information from other sources and have pre-conceived assumptions about your financial institution.
In this world of social networks and self-publication, conversations about your company, your products, and your people occur anywhere and everywhere. We see companies reacting how you’d expect: entering social networks because it’s the thing to do.

To be successful, customer-focused banks have to participate in every aspect of the customer conversation. Whether it’s on blogs or social network sites, or somewhere else, the most important thing is to allow customers to communicate with you as easily as they communicate with each other. Banks need to get beyond feeling that conversations with customers are an incremental cost and are complaint-related, and begin embracing the voice of the customer beyond marketing messaging.

Customers want to provide feedback anywhere, and everywhere about anything. They don’t want to be surveyed, they want to be listened to. True customer experience management involves putting listening posts throughout your customer lifecycle, integrating these listening posts to the business processes that deliver products and services and empowering your employees to participate with customers on a weekly, daily, and ideally, hourly basis.

There are financial institutions out there that are examples of best practice in customer experience management. A major European bank, for example, has a program in place to capture customer experience at all phases of the customer lifecycle and at critical transaction points such as a mortgage renewal. They combine customer-driven, company-driven and transaction specific customer experience information on a single platform which is distributed in real-time to employees across the bank. Front-line employees who interact closely with customers benefit from customers-at-risk alerting and closed-loop feedback management tools. Line managers can use real-time operational score cards for employee coaching and action management to track issue resolution. Decision makers can use strategic executive dashboards for a complete experience overview and trend analysis to uncover opportunities for strategic improvement.

Customer experience management is no longer a “nice to have”. It is a must have in today’s highly competitive market. Customer experience management technology exists today and is helping the leaders in the industry to develop significant competitive advantage by connecting to their customers in real-time.

For more information, go to www.responsetek.com/fst