Banks have opportunity to improve customer engagement, study suggests
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MANY customers have been let down by their banks, according to FIS, a global provider of banking and payment technologies
However, this could present a great opportunity for banks to engage more deeply with their customers to help them achieve their financial goals, Brian Birt, managing director for Asean and North Asia, said recently.
While many respondents to an online survey by FIS said banks did very well in many areas, there remained a large gap between their expectations and their perceptions of bank performance.
Customers might feel that the areas the banks have done well in are the least important for them, while the ones they feel are the most important are where they get less satisfaction.
Last November, FIS and market research house TNS studied the expectations of 9,000 bank consumers in nine countries – Thailand, Germany, the United States, Britain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, India and Brazil. The respondents were aged 18-75.
In Thailand, 1,000 household financial decision-makers were surveyed.
Then they created the FIS Consumer Banking PACE (Performance Against Customer Expectations) Index. Germany scored the highest at 83 out of 100, while Thailand was the lowest of the nine at 62.
The company developed the index to help banks get a better understanding of customers’ key expectations and the banks’ current delivery performance against those expectations.
The findings are expected to help banks identify more clearly and prioritise effectively the areas they should improve performance in, in order to deepen consumer engagement.
The banks identified in the survey include state-owned, private and foreign banks.
In Thailand, consumers ranked 18 attributes according to what they regard as important and perceptions of the performance of their primary banking service provider – the financial institution that holds their primary current account or its equivalent.
These measures allow for comparison between customers’ expectations and banks’ performances, which were calculated as a positive or negative gap score.
In Thailand, 90 per cent of consumers perceived that their bank’s performance fell below their expectations. Consumers placed the most importance on safety (82 score) and the least importance on in-person service (30).
Some of the poor performance can be explained by the young population, who are less satisfied than older customers.
The wider-than-average negative gaps between expectation and performance in the two most important attributes, safety and security, have a negative effect on Thailand’s index results. Safety means how well banks protect customers’ money, while security means the protection of their personal information.
Banks were recommended to employ analytic capabilities and online, mobile and social platforms to deliver information alerts, advisory services and planning tools that are personalised and deeply integrated into consumers’ lives.
On the positive side, banks meet consumers’ basic requirements, such as product simplicity, convenience, and connectivity to online and mobile services anywhere, any time. Consumers also rated banks as performing significantly above expectations in digital payment options for financial transactions.
