Improving the Customer Experience in the Branch

While reading American Banker, I came across an article entitled "Organic Growth by Overhauling Client Experience" and realized that if all financial institutions incorporated our solutions not only online, but in the branch, customer satisfaction and organic growth would increase dramatically.

In the article, there were some statistics on customer experience gathered from research done by Maritz Inc. It stated that 43% of defecting customers leave retail banks because of a negative experience and after having a bad experience, 70% of these unhappy customers told others about their experience.

I have personally contributed to these stats in the last week due to the fact that I am currently in the process of closing all relationships with my primary bank and moving all of my services to another financial institution. After a bad experience, well actually many, I have finally decided to pack up and leave. But not only am I terminating all of my current relationships with the bank, I have also vented to several people about my experience with this bank. So when they decide to open an account, what are the chances they will go to that bank for their services? I would say pretty slim.

By improving the customer experience in your financial institution and being able to cut the number of defecting customers in half or even a fourth, think of all of the relationships you could save. Customer experience shows a higher correlation to organic growth than any other factor. Therefore, the goal of your financial institution needs to be to create a customer-centric organization and supply the best customer service and value to your customers that you possibly can. So how do you do this? What can you do to build a "great" customer experience?

Perhaps one of the best ways to enhance a customer's experience is cut down on the time it takes to perform tasks in the branch. When it takes a banking representative an hour to key in the customer's information and complete verification requirements to open an account, this does not demonstrate a positive customer experience. No wonder cross sell strategies are not met when the banking representative is too busy rekeying information and after 30 minutes or more of waiting, patience is lost by the customer and they no longer want to even listen to other services or cross sell offers.

Streamlining the process of opening an account in the branch using uMonitor's uOpen & uFund^® will not only cut down on the time in opening an account (from an hour to a few minutes), but it increases the value of the experience for the customer. This gives the banking reprehensive more time to build relationships with the customer and provides them more cross selling opportunities. The uMonitor application process offers related products to the customer, like check order, ATM card, auto-loans, online banking, all eservices, etc. No longer does a bank representative have to suggest additional products and services that are irrelevant to the customer or skip over additional sales opportunities because they are too engrossed in the cumbersome old account application process. With uMonitor, it is possible to decrease repetitive tasks, improve back office handling, and reduce costs, while delighting patrons with increased positive interaction and generating new revenue possibilities. This can all be done with the same product - uMonitor's uOpen & uFund^®. You can then offer other uMonitor services, such as uTransfer^® and uSwitch^®, to further deepen the relationship with your customers.