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Digital banking tech does not give your customers the experience you think it does. It's time for banks to stop creating customer experiences and to fix the drive-through.
Photo by Ed Leszczynskl on Unsplash
Customer Service is Your Customers’ Experience
One of the streaming services I subscribe to displays this message when the show or film I’m watching hangs:
Optimizing this video for your enjoyment
Stuff hangs a lot.
This is nonsense. The film or show is hanging due to either a glitch in their software or a slight hiccup in my internet connection - and the company just won’t admit it. Or worse, the company can’t be bothered to figure it out and fix the problem. I suspect it’s the streaming company’s problem because this just doesn’t happen with other services. I click on reload and the film restarts, sometimes where it hung or several minutes before.
This experience is for my enjoyment.
I don’t enjoy this experience, but I want to watch the films and shows on this streaming service. So, I put up with this “enjoyment” message - for now.
More and more financial institutions want customers to access the bank via mobile apps but fail to also transform their support systems when customers need them most.
A large retailer fails to deliver a product that costs several hundred dollars that I ordered online. Several calls and months later, the credit card company is finally able to remove the purchase from my account. During these many months I never receive a proactive update from the credit card company.
In response to an “urgent” email from a credit card company, I called the company to confirm the fraudulent transaction and ended up making making 4 calls just to complete that task. Each customer service representative assured me that regulations required them to ask me for full explanation of the fraud and for all of my personal information each time I was transferred to them. I lost track of how long this entire process took; I was sitting in my car in a parking lot waiting for my daughter’s gymnastics practice to end.
A bank I have an account with just introduced a new practice of charging me say $15/month unless I make at least 1 transaction each month. Apparently the years of monthly deposits are meaningless. Now I’m looking for other places to save the money.
Sure, I have some positive experiences:
I made a purchase through a website that I discovered only later was fraudulent. Like everyone else, I regularly get alerts that fraudulent transactions are hitting my credit card or debit accounts. This time, this call, my credit card company cancelled the card, put in an order to mail me a new card, and set in motion their process for dealing with the fraudulent “company.” It took just 15 minutes.
My debit card was compromised recently. The 1st and only person I spoke with at my bank took all my information, put a hold on the debit card and invited to go to a branch in the morning to get a new debit card. The customer service rep at the branch put the new card in my hand in 15 minutes.
I used to track consumer complaints about bank customer service on social media but it was relentless and usually far worse than my experiences.
It is almost as if the streaming service and other companies — as well as many financial institutions - put up a wall of faux support to prevent customers from asking for and getting actual customer support.
Digital Might Be Killing Customer Service
Your customers run into this wall at the very moments they need it the most: When they desperately need help. The stakes couldn’t be higher. This is the moment that will keep the customer closer or drive him or her away. It would make sense that the FI would do more to lower the obstacles and create easy to follow, transparent paths to help, to problem resolution. Yet, even in these instances, obstacles seem to emerge every day.
The digital tools that FIs use to transform banking, improve the customer experience and increase revenue also enable them to throw up enough digital gatekeepers in the hopes that customers will just give up and be satisfied with what they can get. Sure, some will be so annoyed and will cancel their subscriptions or close their bank accounts. Most, or enough, people will simply forget about the problems when they can watch the shows they want and, even more importantly, forget about and fail to track the monthly or yearly streaming fee dinging their credit card or payment accounts.
The problem with your customer service problems is that these experiences are the foundation of your customers’ experiences. In spite of bank focus on bank-centric customer experiences, customers actually create their own experiences. And a huge part of these experiences include all the times your FI left them hanging, waiting on hold or told them to jump through 5 more hoops to complete some process. I wrote about that here:
Photo by Earl Wilcox on Unsplash
Stop Chasing the Customer Experience
What’s the solution to the obstacles to positive customer support and experiences?
Stop chasing the customer experience
That’s right. Stop pretending anyone is interested in a customer experience that isn’t determined, controlled by banks. “Customer experience” is typically about the bank - or banker’s - view of customers and how they should approach the bank (with reverence for the enigma, the brand) — all of which comes across too many times as if they, banks, don’t like customers that much.
Banks Don’t Like Their Customers
This customer antipathy is coming across in recent spate of consumer account closings - often without warning. That doesn’t sound like a positive customer experience. The advice? “If you don’t want to be treated like a criminal, don’t act like a criminal.”
Put yourself in the shoes of the fraud analysts at your bank. If it’s not a local credit union or single-branch community bank, they have no idea who you are. They often work on a kind of assembly line, where they must meet a daily quota of alerts that have to be adjudicated. The prompts frequently come straight from the surveillance software that banks use to monitor your transactions.
Don’t want to be flagged by algorithms as a criminal? Have the right kind of transaction patterns!
Plenty of people do not have neat and tidy financial lives like that, but algorithms have neither sympathy nor empathy. If your life is a bit messy, try to maintain some kind of pattern with your transactions, particularly if you tend to make or receive large payments with different parties or transfer large amounts of money to and from external accounts.
Yet, banks have spent years evaluating implementing technologies that they know advertise enable them to know you, to personalize services at the branch, ATM or mobile app.
So, banks can offer completely personalized views of your money but they can’t personalize their algorithmic analysis of your money and transaction patterns.
If Not Customer Experience, Then What?
Instead of customer experience, banks can use digital technologies to show that they like their customers. Sounds soft, unquantifiable and just squishy, right?
If bankers want to show that they like their customers, I suggest they take more clues from Chik-fil-A.
Yes, the corporation’s past support of anti-LGBT groups and the founder’s religious beliefs may be annoying or offensive to you. Or not. I am not endorsing that aspect of the company.
Chik-fil-A is an interesting case study of a company that likes its customers. A company that hires workers who like their customers - or at least can appear to like them for several minutes. Who can replace the incorrect order with the correct one without throwing fries in your face. Who say “thank you” when you finish a transaction. Who are never on FaceTime when you pull up to order.
I never frequented the fast food place until my daughter asked me to stop there for dinner one evening a couple of years ago. Ever since my first visit via the drive-through, I have been fascinated by the service.
Small Operational Innovations
Every time I visit a different franchise store, I find a different layout for routing drive-through traffic and in-store traffic to parking. Each store adapts to the specific location and traffic patterns. If you’ve been to a Chik-fil-A, you know that they are in high traffic areas. They often cause even more traffic especially, but not only, around commuter rush hours.
I tend to follow a routine, I revisit the same Chik-fil-A over and over again, during the busiest times of the day. And every time I notice adjustments to the drive-through. This is critical because the drive-through is very busy. Drive-through traffic has a tendency to build quickly and leak out of the parking lot into the mall entrance road and even into the road that passes the mall and the Chik-fil-A. Each visit, I see an attempt to move the line faster without changing what the customer does: order food and pay for it.
A couple of years ago, the drive-through lines got too long and started blocking traffic on the road in front of Chik-fil-A. Workers came out into the 2 car lines to keep cars moving and to take orders and payments. This meant that drivers didn’t have to stop in the line and then again to order and then to pay. Everything done while the driver is already waiting. The only other stop is to pick up the meal. While the line is long, we don’t wait a long time.
Critically, the workers on the drive-through have the tools they need to do their jobs. When it rains, workers have rain coats and umbrellas. They work on hardened tablets with plenty of cushioning and places for the workers to grab them. They have headsets to communicate with their co-workers. Every worker says “thank you” and when you say “thank you” they reply “it’s my pleasure.” None of them knows my name. I doubt that they recognize me. But no one has treated me like a criminal.
Dozens if not hundreds of cars move through that drive through every day. We recently stopped for chicken nuggets. Once again changes in the drive-through. The lanes were defined by bones. No more last minute lane switching (and opportunities for accidents, I’m sure). An area near the food pickup was carved out to deliver orders to cars so that in a rush, customers wouldn’t have to wait again.
This constant tweaking of the operation is agile & iterative. The very essence of innovation. The essence of digital innovation.
Did Chik-fil-A send me a customer service survey to discover these problems? No. But I bet a manager or supervisor goes out to watch the drive-through process and see the problems for him or herself. If that manager or owner wants to improve profits, the Chik-fil-A has to sell more and keep customers coming back. Customers who leave annoyed, angry, hungry, or more tired because they waited so long, don’t come back. This isn’t news or innovation - it’s simple retail economics.
Takeaways
Stop trying to be like Uber or Lyft or AirBnB and be more like Chik-fil-A.
Fix your drive-through.
Make your banking and payments products and services as compliant and fast and plentiful as possible.
Evaluate and update your app, website, ATM, teller, drive-through, customer service and any other channel so that all of them are super-simple for the customer to find and complete the transaction she needs. Get her on and off the app/ATM/teller with as little confusion as possible.
Fix all time critical processes, especially those that customers have to do regarding the security of their money. For example:
how many steps and how much time does a customer (not a banker) have to spend to report credit card fraud?
How many channels or people does the customer have to use or talk to?
How many times does the customer have to authenticate her identity or repeat the claim?
Can the customer do this from every single channel? Are the steps different at each channel? What kind of documentation do you send the customer to confirm the report, progress of the claim and resolution?
Figure out what areas, processes, app designs cause your customers stress. Don’t ask your customers what they want. They have probably already told you in actions or words.
Focus on those areas that cause customers stress. For some financial institutions that might be lines at the branch or a particular ATM. For others, it’s a bank-centric presentation of banking and payment activities. For still others, it might be the “customer journey” you’ve imposed on your customers and potential customers.
Get those customer service reports and dig into them to find recurring themes and problems and questions. Have someone run the emails that customers send to you through ChatGPT or the equivalent to find recurring themes and words.
Start fixing problems and don’t stop. Attack by theme or channel or product. I don’t think it matters.
Fix the small things: Customers will notice.
What’s the measurable result of these efforts? You won’t have to tell your customers over and over ad nauseum that you like them, that their “call is important to you.” You don’t have to send them a survey after every transaction to measure satisfaction. Why? Because customers will already know what you think of them.
Who writes PivotAssets?
I’m an independent analyst, strategic advisor & consultant (& a former Gartner analyst). I’ve worked in and covered the banking industry for over 2 decades. I write about digital banking in this newsletter - not to confirm what you know (and you are plenty smart!) but to give you a fresh perspective & analysis on the transformation that is —and isn’t happening - in the industry.
How can I help you?
To collaborate with me on a similar project or something else completely different whether an analysis of your GTM stragey, analyst briefing presentation, a webinar series, podcast, panel, please contact me at stessa@pivotassets.co or via LinkedIn.
I’m also available for inquiry and strategy sessions via Third Eye Advisory.
Me, Elsewhere
I’m an expert advisor at Third Eye Advisory.
I spoke with Theodora Lau and Barb Maclean on their podcast One Vision about smart banking & hidden tribes
I moderated a great panel of folks for a conversation on innovation. We cut through the hype and share practical advice for making your digital transformation efforts pay off. We definitely talked about the importance of small innovations.
How can banks be truly low friction? They must address friction everywhere. Otherwise innovation & digital transformation will elude them. In this report I identified the characteristic of a low friction bank and why legacy core banking and architectures don’t support it.
What can the Kardashians teach your financial institution about partnerships and innovation? How can working with empathic fintechs help you identify niche groups (aka hidden tribes) and innovate. All this and more in this this ebook that you can download at Praxent or Nymbus.
Adopt an Agile Digital Banking Platform: How bankers must have an agile digital banking platform to support both global and local trends and requirements to help them identify new niche markets that will drive innovation, create new value and increase profitability. In this report I identified a set of capabilities that a digital banking platform must have that will help take banks into a competitive future and urges banks to select a digital banking partner who shares their innovation, vision and support for new value creation.
Yes, I worked with clients on these ebooks and webinars. They may ask you for information before you can download or watch them.