Retail banks in the United States spend several hundred billion dollars “servicing” their clients – that’s hundreds of dollars spent on every customer. Now that’s a lot service! But is it fostering loyalty, or addressing the symptoms and missing the problems? A key question around “service” is how the industry realizes more value from such a significant investment.

John T. McHugh Managing Partner, Financial Services CRM Practice

The Customer Experience is Critical to Profitable Growth

Recent Accenture research highlighted delivery of the “Branded Customer Experience” as the most important of five components of high performance marketing. The ability to develop and deliver such an experience accounted for 33 percent of the increases in satisfaction and loyalty achieved by the more than 700 high performance marketers studied. Among financial services companies, consistent delivery of the brand promise across channels accounted for 47 percent of the improvements driven by the customer experience. An experience that reinforces the value of the relationship – at every touchpoint – is critical to winning customer loyalty and driving organic growth.

As growth and distribution imperatives dominate the agenda, banks are finding it essential to think about the overall customer experience – across channels and across lines of business – rather than managing specific interactions within silos.

Once an institution eliminates or migrates high volumes of low-value interactions, the focus shifts to driving value by operationalizing the Branded Customer Experience as the enabler of differentiated and profitable service. In the context of achieving “High Performance,” many are making headway.

Bankinter in Spain collects and analyzes detailed customer data, down to the level of each customer’s transactions executed by channel, day, and hour. A single view of the segmented and profiled customer – which includes account details, profitability, interaction profile, transactions by channel, purchase history, contact history, and relationships – drives a customized experience across channels. Customer-facing employees access this information on their desktops; automated channels use it to individualize interactions. The result is increased value per customer, thanks to increased sales of appropriate products and services. Bankinter enjoys a cross-sell ratio of 5.7, vs. the industry average of less than 3.

Across industries, Harrah’s is one of the most impressive companies in terms of delivering an integrated multi-channel experience that drives both loyalty and profitability. A customer-focused, data-driven approach is core to Harrah’s strategy and critical to the company’s leadership among U.S. casinos. Harrah’s loyalty program and its underlying technological capabilities are key to its success, enabling Harrah’s to recognize and reward customers in differentiated and profitable ways. Customers receive targeted offers and rewards based on their play and their predicted potential value. The program impacts the experience on the playing floor, in the restaurants and during the hotel stay, delivering a differentiated overall experience that creates a sustainable advantage

Experience Management is an Innovative New Discipline

Experience Management is the organizational ability, at scale, to deliver and refine tailored experiences – consistently across interactions and channels – to raise loyalty. These experiences need to meet customer needs, but also reinforce the brand promise, reaffirm the value proposition, capture feedback and build affinity. At the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, innovation and revitalization become important to reinforcing the competitive barrier.

To help our clients achieve high performance faster, we have developed several solutions around Experience Engineering and Experience Delivery. Experience Engineering is an innovative new discipline that enables banks to anticipate, shape and measure the dimensions of every interaction, and to constantly improve through a test-and-learn approach. The goal is to deliver an experience that is consistent across channels and to provide a pre-planned approach for leveraging the potential of each interaction, ensuring that execution matches the customer strategy and seamlessly delivers the Branded Customer Experience.

To help our clients, we are investing in several tools. Accenture has created a Customer Experience Workbench that is preloaded with best practices, a Multi-Channel Customer Contact Framework that integrates experiences across channels, a Customer Care Root Cause Analysis Platform to control volumes and Self-Service Propensity Models to optimize interactions. With Microsoft, we have developed an Integrated Servicing Desktop solution that allows service representatives to address all aspects of the relationship by seamlessly bringing together information from across an institution.

Go On, Be a Tiger

Shaping and delivering the Branded Customer Experience is not easy, but it is a real opportunity to create tailored customer experiences, and as a result competitive differentiation and long-term growth. Leaders are taking careful steps and beginning to identify the varying needs of customers, manage the entire experience, and drive increased loyalty.

Banks can’t afford to wait: Once a few players establish significantly differentiated experiences, they will be extremely difficult to catch.

www.accenture.com