W&F Issue 3 2018

www.wealthandfinance-news.com 36 Wealth & Finance International - Issue 3 - 2018 In an attempt to offset rising costs, providers have for some time offered a self-service facility. Pushing customers to self-serve saves call centre costs and should, ideally provide them with the opportunity of managing their affairs at their own convenience. However, although there has been heavy investment in this, from a customer perspective much of it is a tangle of bureaucracy, muddled terminology and obscure rules. Many providers have built these systems to save themselves costs, not save customers time and effort. Here’s a banking example: most banks, it seems, do not allow you to set up a DD or SO online. Indeed, some banks make you wait ages to talk to an adviser who promptly forces you to go through 20 security questions before they will talk to you for the two minutes it takes to complete the action. For SME accounts this can be even more complicated as the 20 questions are often unanswerable as the responsible director may not know what the last three payments made by the company were. When it comes to current customers it is almost a case of going back to basics – ensuring that they can complete the basic day-to-day tasks that would previously been completed in a branch or via a telephone banking sector. Whilst this may be obvious to those of us who are customers, we have seen too many in this sector rush in with new websites and overly complicated digital strategies, that seem to have left the customer behind. Future customers If a customer is shopping for say, home insurance, sell them home insurance rather than anything else. Just as importantly, start by helping the customer make the right choice, not by flogging them the product associated with this month’s incentive scheme. Treat the customer as an intelligent partner in the process and if they are finding it difficult to understand offer them quick and simple escape routes to speak to a human being. Unless it is easy to find out more details and complete the transaction online, potential customers are going to be put off, no matter how good or appealing a product is unless there are simple, easy and accessible routes to purchase. People value human interaction, especially when they are making important financial choices, Whether it can be transacted on line in full or in part, ensuring that there is enough detail about the product and that it is communicated effectively through the website and other digital channels is crucial. In our experience, providers are not brave enough with the details on products and customers want to make considered choices when it comes to big commitments and are willing to engage with it, so long as the communication is effective. Too many in this sector also rely on endless online FAQs to explain the details and benefits of products. These are simply ineffective, turning prospects away rather than converting them into customers. How do you make this happen? You focus on the customer and this requires you to understand why current customers fail to transact and why potential customers fail to buy. When you understand this you can then test alternative executions simply and cheaply to find the one that generates better performance. For one customer looking to sell car insurance, following this simple mantra generated a 170% increase in leads. To do this required some bravery – including being willing to break brand guidelines such that customer understood what was on offer. After all, whilst a focus promotion of the brand may please internal stakeholders, if doesn’t engage the potential customer then you need to be willing to change how you talk about and present your brand. It’s not just financial services companies who will find the shift to a ‘customer-first’ mind-set a difficult cultural challenge. Whilst many talk about the customer, far fewer deliver to their customers’ expectations (the first half of 2017 saw 3.32 million complaints to Financial Services companies, 38% of which were related to general administration and customer service 2 ). To do this effectively requires an organisation that is aligned to a goal of delivering the best customer experience and, if it fails, to recover from this failure brilliantly. Even the most established organisations struggle to get this right, as demonstrated by RBS, Lloyds and Barclays’ presence in the top three in terms of complaints made in the same period. 3 This doesn’t need more compliance and risk management, it needs end-to-end processes that support getting the voice of the customer into the heart of decision-making on products and services and the service standards that come with them. It needs a leadership who demand the insight to justify changes and the introduction of new products and services and a marketing/ customer function who see their role as listening and responding to customers not telling them. Most of all it needs digital teams who are experts in getting insight from customers and testing to find what works for them, not teams who are experts in digital. After all without customers, you won’t have a business and whilst challengers are just that today, they may not be so tomorrow. 1 https://www.bacs.co.uk/DocumentLibrary/ CASS_dashboard_-_published_24_Jan_18.pdf 2 https://www.fca.org.uk/news/press-releases/ new-fca-complaints-data-3-32-million- complaints-about-financial-services-first-six- months-2017 3 http://www.ombudsman-complaints-data.org.uk/ “You focus on the customer and this requires you to understand why current customers fail to transact and why potential customers fail to buy.”