92% of bankers surveyed at FICO World 2013 last week in Miami said improving the customer experience at their company is a high priority or the top priority. Given that the majority of those attending are in risk management, fraud and collections, this shows how serious banks are about regaining customer trust and loyalty.
Despite this lack of trust, customers may be more willing today to share information with their bank, if there’s a definite benefit. We asked attendees what percentage of their customers would be willing to share more information in exchange for a more personalized experience. More than three-quarters of respondents said they would — here’s the breakdown:
• Approximately 50% - 48% of attendees
• Approximately 75% - 29% of attendees
• Approximately 25% - 17% of attendees
• Close to 100% - 3% of attendees
• Close to 0% - 3% of attendees
The “customer revolution” was one of the conference’s themes, and Friday's general session included a quartet of C-suite bankers from the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia discussing how their customers feel about the banking experience, and what banks are doing to improve it. Here were some of the interesting observations:
“We’ve had a number of own goals, and shot ourselves in the foot with issues like LIBOR and mortgage settlements. Building customer trust is critical.”
“In China, banking trust is high, since the banks are primarily government-run. If you don’t trust the banks, it means you don’t trust the government.”
“If people have a bad service experience, they can tweet about it immediately. If we respond to the tweet immediately, we can create a positive experience.”
“We’ve clustered clients in terms of their banking transactions, and created very specific clusters we can treat differently. These clusters do a good job of reflecting the personality of clients. For example, here’s one segment called Living Large.”
“We have a program to offer university graduates their first cards, with smaller instalments and lower credit lines. If you help these people to get and build their credit, they’re more loyal to the bank.”
When retailers and other companies are mining vast stores of Big Data to personalize the experience, many banks find themselves playing catch-up in a sport they pioneered — targeted, analytics-based marketing and customer management. As our panel showed, different regions have very different challenges, but all of them face competitive pressures that make positive customer engagement a priority.
