Trust on a brand is built over years.
However, it is lost with one poor customer experience and with continuous such
poor experiences, the news spreads far and wide, leading to devastating effects.
For many financial institutions, such loss in trust by the customers has led to
them not only being charged millions of dollars in fines, but also, millions in
remediation, and worst of them all, public censure, and reputation loss!
Since 1999, Harris Poll has been
quantifying the public reputation of organisations in the US, across the
industries, and have found that 80% of the respondents to their survey, have
always rated “lying or misrepresenting facts about a product or service”, as
the top reason affecting reputation. In the latest findings, there is only 4
financial services organisations in the US in the top 50 – most favourable of
them is perched at 13, others are at 17, 45 and 47. Other top reasons for the
fall of reputation and trust in a financial institution are “lack of fee
transparency”, “providing biased advice for my needs”, “misusing my data”.
A survey by Ernst & Young, suggests
that the rise of self-financial management tools propagated digitally and the
rise of non-banks and neo banks, has also contributed to lack of trust in the
traditional financial institutions. With the increasing dependence and ease of
use of digital solutions, the trust in technology is increasing, leading to increasing
trust in the non-banks and neo banks, as they fundamentally ride on technology
to reach the customers and provide them solutions.
Research firm Forrester highlights the
relationship among trust, advocacy, loyalty and future purchase intent in
financial services. The research says, “Customer advocacy — the extent to which
a firm’s customers believe it does what’s best for them, not just what’s best
for its own bottom line (in other words, TRUST) — is a top predictor of
customer retention and growth. US financial services customers who rate their
firms highest on customer advocacy are most likely to consider those firms for
future purchases.”
The bottom line is that like any other
relationship, customers base trust as the cornerstone of their relationship
with their financial institution. Let’s look at how banks can potentially embrace
trust as the fulcrum of all their policy making and decisioning.
To drive trust as the pivot for all
organisation decisions, processes, customer centricity must be the centre stage
conversation. It is a cultural decision that the board and the management have
to drive at all levels, with the right incentives all throughout the
organisation. The most consequential way to trust building is by motivating and
rewarding the right behaviour. Right from the front-end staff to the CEO to the
Board, has to find and do the right thing for their customers. The senior
management must become the ambassadors of customer centricity, and trust and
that must drive all decision making. With the focus on earning customer’s
trust, by building a culture of customer centricity, one of the largest banks
in Australia, recently announced an investment of $50 million towards a
coaching, education and accreditation program for each one of the 34,000 of the
bank staff. While announcing the program, the CEO of the bank remarked that
their customers expect their bank to know them and get behind them with
products and services to help them prosper. As a bank, they will meet those
needs by doing the right thing for their customers and getting the basics right
– every time.
For a financial institution, delivering
complete transparency in product and service features and fees is a key driver
towards building trust with customers. Research has proven positive correlation
between fee transparency and customer advocacy. If customers don’t find their
financial institution to be transparent on its fees, they are less likely to
recommend them to others, making banks lose opportunities to cross/up sell and
future business. Driving complete transparency on fees and product and service features
is a prerequisite for banks to own the role of a trusted advisor. A centralised
product catalogue and a centralised pricing engine sitting on top of all the
product systems, that drives product orchestration at the channels and
automates the pricing process for the financial institutions can go a long way
in enabling product features and fees transparency.
Having a streamlined and seamless approach
to customer touch points is crucial to drive customer experience and build
trust. Such infrastructure is key to enabling improvements in efficiency, accuracy,
and service. Imagine a customer starting a loan application on the digital
channel, however, must visit the branch to finish the application with
assistance. Moreover, as the branch and the digital channels are disjointed,
the customer must restart the application, with some data/information loss
through the movement across the channels. Or a customer sees a special offer on
internet banking channel, however, he does not see that offer on the mobile
app. Such poor experiences can be rooted out by a centralised platform that
enables data and information flow between the channels. To drive operational
excellence, back end systems must be integrated with the touch points to enable
easy orchestration of product and service information and fees. Such ease with
operations will propel transparency across the processes, enhanced self-servicing
and even empower the financial institution staff to direct the customer to
right choices.
Privacy and protection of customer data is
another key factor in enhancing trust. With the widespread use of digital, data
assumes tremendous significance. Thus, its misuse grows. And with this the need
for data protection against cybercrimes, fraud, misconduct, etc, swells significantly.
Financial Institutions need to have the right mechanisms to not only protect
customer data and keep it private and confidential, but also protect against,
say credit card fraud, payment fraud, or similar crimes. With the increasing demand
for Open Banking requirements/commitments across the globe, managing and
protecting the customer data will be even more critical. Clear responsibility
of holding and managing such data is going to be paramount. It is not only
about having the necessary infrastructure and process in place, but also about a
proactive process and a customer centric approach. The staff needs to be regularly
sensitised against such misconduct and misuse of data. The country and regional
privacy laws – the likes of GDPR in the EU, The Privacy Act 1988 in Australia, The
Data Protection Act 2018 in the UK and similar, need to be operationalised with
regular checks and monitoring in place. Financial Institutions should look at
building additional controls into the products and services that restricts
misuse of any customer data.
For a typical financial institution working
as different sub-businesses within the single institution, having a “single
source of truth” for product and services or fees, or even customer data, can
be a pipe dream. However, there are institutions, who have achieved this with varying
degrees of success, and continuing the path. Unless the front-line staff or the
customer service representative does not have the holistic picture of the
customer, it is always going to be different for him to serve the customer
appropriately and “do the right thing.” And if one asks the customer to wait
and come back a few days later, the battle is already lost. This is where
integrating data across silos and empowering staff to deliver the right product
or service, is going to enhance the customer experience and trust.
With the growing use of digitalisation, and the experiences from the other industries, customers expect the similar superior experiences from their financial institutions. Fallout from the current Covid-19 situation and ensuing spurt in use of everything digital, the trust in tech and digital is growing at a pace like never before. This will put financial institutions at the crossroads, where they not only have to shore up their balance sheet in this uncertain environment, but also invest in ways to grow their customer’s trust in them.