Despite increasing automation and self-service within the banking sector, customers are still looking for the personal touch when seeking query resolution. In the wake of his recent white paper, 'The Five Myths of Customer Service Satisfaction', Mike Clarkin, vice-president of marketing at Sykes, explains the benefits of a successfully implemented CRM strategy.
The changing economic climate has had a marked impact on the way that financial institutions handle their customer relations. While banks initially focused on cost-cutting, consolidation and efficiency to offset losses at the start of the global downturn, there is now an added emphasis on transparency and optimising customer experience, loyalty and retention.
In a bid to compartmentalise the diverse consumer demands of the banking sector, the contact centre outsourcing industry continues to play a prominent role. In alleviating the complexities of customer services and relationships through the presence of a third party, financial institutions are consequently free to focus on other core issues such as product development and risk management.
As a global contact centre service provider, Sykes is present in 24 countries, utilising over 30 years of market experience. As well as serving the financial services sector, it also provides support to the communications, healthcare and technology industries.
According to Mike Clarkin, vice-president of marketing at Sykes, serving the financial services sector requires a more multi-faceted approach compared with other industries, due to the large assortment of customer issues.
"We appreciate that financial sector customers are in need of a service for very personal and sensitive reasons," he says. "It could concern an account, loan, home mortgage, retirement plan or savings for a child's education. This demands a high level of sophistication in how we handle security so the customer feels that they can trust the person they are talking to."
As an alternative to more traditional customer satisfaction research techniques, Sykes has also added a set of metrics and functions to assess the potential pitfalls of intra-banking CRM processes, including Net Promoter Score, which gauges the loyalty of a business's customer relationships.
"There are lots of sophisticated approaches being applied," says Clarkin. "However, it is important to point out that there is no one single metric for measuring customer experience. You really have to manage across a spectrum, which also includes taking care of dissatisfied customers and improving relations with those that are happy, but could be happier. Therefore, there is a multiple tactic strategy in place to manage customer experience."
The bigger picture
In response to a growing onus placed on metrics and customer experience, Clarkin, alongside an in-house analysis team, devised the white paper, The Five Myths of Customer Service Satisfaction. Stemming from a company programme entitled Insight Analytics, the theories are the result of over five years of customer service research.
According to research, the most common misconceptions of customer service satisfaction are complaints should always receive top priority; soft skills equate to the perfect customer experience; First Call Resolution (FCR) should be the major objective for agents; prolonged calls indicate diligence; and customer satisfaction always results in loyalty.
"It was designed to fill a gap with regards to what makes an optimised customer experience," says Clarkin. "We decided to look at the bigger picture and analyse what was missing and the inconsistencies in our industry. After five years of research, we can now benchmark it against what we've seen in other companies and industries, allowing us to help clients uncover these problems and then redesign the processes, training and management of our agents. In the five myths, we have come across methods of managing customer experience so as not to become over-dependent on a single dimension and miss the bigger picture."
Clarkin's first myth addresses the importance of prioritising the resolution of complaints and difficult customers, referred to as a 'squeaky wheel situation'. While agents should aim to solve customer complaints as efficiently as possible, it can be detrimental to overemphasise an issue that represents a small proportion of a customer base.
"Although complaints can be valid and important, I would also say that it's really important not to overreact to them," he says. "If you're only getting 3-5% of your customer base complaining, to over-focus on that squeaky wheel is to do so at the expense of the other 95% who also require an excellent service. It really is a matter of balance and looking at both ends of the spectrum."
In its recruitment of agents, Sykes's primary criteria rests on interpersonal qualities such as a desire to solve problems and help people. However, as observed in Clarkin's second myth, a polite telephone manner and compassion for the customer's needs cannot be prioritised at the expense of first-rate product knowledge. These strata of hard and soft skills are honed in tandem so as to develop the right balance.
"We think of it like building a house," he says. "When you call a customer service centre, you are looking to speak to a representative that clearly understands their products and policies and how to get your transaction solved efficiently - these are your minimum requirements. Therefore, we firstly focus on training hard skills such as knowledge of the product, policies and the flow needed to get a transaction completed. If all you do is focus on soft skills, you could miss the basics around problem resolution, hindering customer satisfaction."
Many companies within the contact centre service sector make FCR a high priority, equating it directly to customer service satisfaction. Whilst Clarkin doesn't entirely discard this approach, he highlights that the dogma doesn't take into account that less customer follow-up doesn't necessarily indicate complete resolution.
"Also, you sometimes have customers that are simply more difficult to serve for whatever reason," he says. "Either because the case is more complicated or the agent's understanding of the process isn't as advanced due to a lack of experience with that particular query. It's easy to ake FCR your mantra but if taken to its extreme, it can iss key devices such as soft skills."
Conversely, Clarkin maintains that cases shouldn't be prolonged with the myth that the more time spent on a query, the better the experience for the customer. Instead, if the agent has the means and knowledge to resolve a problem, it should be done as efficiently as possible.
"By allowing calls to run long in the spirit of being helpful, the institution can sometimes be masking poor performances on the part of its agents. To tackle this, we teach our agents to be skilled in effective probing questions which can most likely lead to a quick and efficient call," he says.
The ideal customer
With the advent of online services and automated technology, banking customers are able to access their accounts and resolve problems manually at the click of a button. Rather than jeopardise the future of the contact centre sector, Clarkin believes these 'transactional relationships' between customers and institutions have created a new paradoxical marketplace for outsource centres - as personal customer conversations become rarer, the management of inbound calls carries greater value.
"What makes the industry interesting, and also very challenging, is that customers are encouraged to go online and check their accounts, but when they call with an enquiry, it's incredibly important to make sure it's a personal experience."
Even then, perceived satisfaction shouldn't be taken for granted as automatic loyalty as there is still the possibility of customer defection. As argued in the white paper's fifth and final myth, an agent's performance should ideally yield an 'advocate' - the ideal customer.
"Despite the fine line, there is a world of difference between a satisfied customer and a loyal customer. So many of the experiences we have every day are "good", but don't inspire us to mention it to a friend or colleague. The five myths are designed to warn against becoming dependent on just one of these approaches in attaining a loyal customer base - you really need all five of them to have a comprehensive and effective management of your customer experience. It's all about striking the right balance"
