What to write for my “Q” blog was taxing me for a while, so I sent out a plea for help on Twitter over the weekend and a good few of the suggestions that came back were for something on quality of service in financial services.
This is a subject that FS business’s talk about a lot. Many invest millions of pounds measuring and tracking all kinds of satisfaction metrics. Despite all that though, we still read about the UK’s largest banks and their hundreds and thousand of complaints, so the garden is clearly not rosy.
I remember in the eighties when I was first made a chief cashier in a large NatWest branch in Holborn in central London, I had all sorts of ideas on how I would improve customer service in my branch and mark us out from the other banks in the area.
I set to work devising a questionnaire for my cashiers to use with visiting customers, in an effort to find the silver bullet that would enable us to shine. In reality the results told me that expectations were actually pretty simple to fulfil. Fundamentally the vast majority of branch users at that time wanted 3 things:
“More staff on at lunchtime so I don’t have to queue”
“A smile always helps”
“Make sure there is a pen on the end of the chain”
Now I am guessing that expectations have increased somewhat since those days, but I am willing to bet that some fundamental customer needs still very firmly exist, in common with those three basic requests.
Cashing a cheque or paying money into a savings account is not in itself a particularly fun thing to do. Its not like browsing for clothes or sitting comfortably with a cappuchino, so therefore the ability to waste the minimum time queuing or transacting is important. ATM’s, telephone banking and the internet have all added to the control we all have as consumers and allow us to make more of these transactions at a time and in a way that suits us.
When human interaction is required a simple smile still goes a long way, as does the feeling that the person providing the service is there solely for you for the duration of your transaction. I often buy a meal deal (sandwich, drink and snack) for my lunch from a well known high street retailer, which just happens to be a few doors up the road from our head office. I think it is fair to say that the service experience is pretty mixed. There are a couple of till staff who pretty much continue with their personal conversation, interrupting their flow only to blurt out the robotic, loyalty card?, bag? and £3.39 please. There is another who is always chewing gum, quite noisily too, which puts me off somewhat and another who is always extremely friendly with polite chatter and a big smile. My boring lunch always tastes a little better when she has served me.
For me the modern variant of “pen on the end of the chain” (apart from ensuring that there always is one of course) is that things do what customers expect them to do. The website works properly, statements arrive when they are supposed to, transactions are applied correctly, staff do what they promise etc.etc. The problem though is one of scale. As the banking and financial services world has grown in scale and automated and centralised to drive up efficiency, gremlins have appeared that mean things do go wrong.
In fairness they always did. However you could go into your local branch, bark at the manager a bit and it would get sorted quickly and efficiently. Those routes to resolution don’t really exist any more. By way of example we recently hired a new manager for one of our branches who had come from a large UK bank. The bank in question does not have a very good reputation for customer service. As I do with all new joiners to Saffron I spent some time with this individual in her first week or so and discussed the importance here of doing the right thing for our members and customers. I prodded a bit on her previous employer and was shocked to hear that as a branch manager there, with little or no empowerment, she found it just as difficult to resolve problems for her customers, as many will have experienced direct. She had to deal with faceless call centres, no direct line to the person she previously dealt with on the issue, repetition, lack of anyone who could or would make a decision….. sound familiar?
All the customer satisfaction metric systems in the world will not solve the basic fundamental issue that sometimes the best way to win customer advocacy is to be really rather good a fixing a problem should something go wrong.
We have discussed at Saffron things like satisfaction guarantees. I think this is pretty hard to do in a service business, as we will from time to time make an error. What we can guarantee though is that Saffron will listen and fix things if we get it wrong. I will personally get involved in any matter that we haven’t been able to sort through the normal channels and own its resolution. A bit like the old fashioned bank manger used to do.
Service business will always have error rates, perhaps we should keep it simple, queues, smiles, pens and resolution!
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