The Analysis News & Opinions


‘Consider personal contact experience’


Business professionals must take account of their own customer experiences when developing engagement strategies, according to a senior industry professional. Speaking at a round-table event run


by CCRMagazine, in association with Esendex, Adam Rathbone,


solutions


consultant at Esendex, said: “I think that companies sometimes make a mistake, in that they do not take how they interact with businesses into consideration, and how they interact with other people. It has changed significantly over the past few years with smartphones and different apps. “A lot of people will be communicating


with friends and family throughout the day, but they will be having a conversation that is constantly ongoing. They will send a message, will go to work and send another message and go to the gym. A lot of businesses do not take that into consideration when they are opening up these different channels. “You have to think: this is how customers


communicate on a day-to-day basis today, but we still try to force them down these specific channels. We are still trying to make them call us when they do not want to do so. For me, I am a classic case of ‘just send me a text with a link and I will self-serve’. If they do that, then I will do what they want me to do, but then I will constantly get voicemails and e-mails where it will go into an e-mail address that I check once a month.” Denise Crossley, CEO of MMF, added:


“This comes back to age groups. Thinking about my children, who are all four years apart, the youngest is 21 and the eldest is 29: there is quite a difference between those two. If you send a 21 year old an e-mail, then he either never responds to it, or if his e-mail inbox is full, he just opens a new e-mail address! But he will converse via WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram. He has moved on with technology, whereas the eldest is still e-mailing. So it is really important to know the customer and to understand that different age groups do different things.” James O’Hare, head of commercial team UK&I at Esendex, said: “From a customer-


December 2017


engagement perspective, this is especially true for the younger audiences. I was at a conference recently and heard about a research paper that was focused on the rising consumer behaviours that exist today. It is clear brands and organisations are no longer being compared against their peers in that particular industry. An online catalogue is not being compared to another online catalogue, they are now being compared to some of the best customer-engagement brands in the world; disruptive technologies like Uber or Netflix. That is the bar now for organisations, and, as soon as you fall short of that bar by adding friction, the customers are going elsewhere and they will not engage and come back to you.” Meanwhile, Martin Wicks, risk & internal


audit manager for ARC (Europe), said: “We have had telephone, IVR, and web-payment facilities for 10 years and measure monthly transactions. In the first month there were three payments, but customer uptake has increased exponentially annually. Sometimes customers receive the initial letter, pay in full via the IVR or online and the matter is fully resolved with no more engagement needed. It is a case of offering customers appropriate methods to pay or to engage, early on. “Self-service has come on in leaps and


bounds: just a couple of years ago, I was at a roundtable and we were nervously debating whether we should provide customers with more self-service opportunities, as we were unsure whether the regulators or our clients would ‘like’ that approach. Today it seems everyone accepts and promotes self-serve as a real customer benefit.”


www.CCRMagazine.co.uk


The banking industry is in the midst of a digital revolution, bringing the most disruptive change both the mainstream and private banking scenes have experienced. This calls for lenders to take a new


approach to governance, including selecting board members who have the knowledge and vision in financial technology. Advances in technology and innovation shaping customer needs and


are


expectations and have also become the topic of new regulatory requirements. A growing number of banks are aiming to become digital-banking leaders, but these strategic goals are rarely reflected in the knowledge and skill sets of the suite of board members. The priority, when selecting board


members over the past few years, has been placed upon selecting individuals with skill and experience in credit risk and regulatory compliance, which are both core areas when maintaining a robust governance framework. However, only a few banks have proceeded


to add digital and technology leaders to their boardrooms, which has resulted in an inconsistency between shifting business objectives of banks and the expertise of the collective members of their boards. This knowledge gap will hold many banks


from the technological transformations needed to keep those banks relevant. It also puts banks at a disadvantage when trying to compete with fintech companies, which, most of the time, are run by highly innovative and digitally savvy executives.


Antoniella Gauci Risk manager, Pilatus Bank


Opinion


Time for an IT revolution on bank boards?


7


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