Retail banking services across the GCC have been getting a lot of negative press over the past few years, mostly as a result of poor customer service. Customers have complained about long delays in getting through to customer service agents, inefficiency on the part of the bank in dealing with complaints and a lack of knowledge from the banking staff on everything from products to procedure. Customers have complained about being put on hold for up to 20 minutes at a time and then being passed around a frustrating number of call centre staff who seemed unwilling or unable to deal with the query.

Yet there appears to be no discernible difference between the quality of service banks are offering, be they local or international and customers feel like they have nowhere to turn. Banks have been busy launching product after product to great fanfare, but seem to have been suspiciously quiet when it comes to trumpeting their ability to ensure customer loyalty. Yet it remains a mystery as to why banks in the Middle East have not been concentrating on this most important of matters.   

The reason, according to Farid Gaffim, the chief executive of the Visionary Embassy, is that banks are under the false impression that the reason they are seeing such phenomenal growth in the Middle East is because of the efficient levels of customer service they are providing. "They have not succeeded because of customer service; they have grown organically due to the amount of money that is pouring into the region. It has to go somewhere."

Research carried out by the Vision Embassy found that retailers suffered the greatest numbers of defections as a result of poor customer service, followed by banks. 72 percent of those queried said that being kept on hold on the phone for too long was the most important reason for their frustration with the service their bank was offering. 57 per cent said customer service technologies such as automated phone services had done nothing to improve the quality of service.   

Into this Middle Eastern breach has stepped the customer service consultant.

"Banks are increasingly recognising the fact that at the end of the day, the type of products they are offering is by and large fairly similar. What will distinguish banks are the different levels of customer service. How you treat your customer is a critical factor in how you retain your customer. Customer loyalties are not built overnight, they are built over a long period of time and having a solid architecture built around customer service is extremely critical and I think banks are increasingly acknowledging it," said V. Ramkumar, a director of Cedar Consulting.

An external consultant worth his salt should able to compare the bank's customer service operations with international or even regional standards. Some banks may boast of having a million customers in their database, but research in some cases will show that 30 to 40 per cent of the customer's accounts have not been used in the past three years and will also show details like customers whose contact details are no longer valid. They are, in effect, not real customers.

But some banks are reluctant to bring in outside consultants, sometimes because of the costs involved. If a bank brings in consultants, then it is effectively outsourcing its end user, which is the source of its profits. Giving the prime source of profits to somebody else to take care of is not something banks do easily. Some banks tend to be reluctant to do this because they feel like they are parting with their customers, and they have trouble trusting an outside source.

The outsourcing model works everywhere, but what banks need to do if they have a backlash is to improve the efficiency of its support staff. The backlash will not simply be because outsourcing is bad; it will more than likely be due to the fact that they have not had proper vendor management experience.

The consultants that invariably come on board will usually insist that the bank will first need to measure customer satisfaction from a contact channel aspect. This will mean monitoring both the inbound and outbound calls the bank is making to its customers. Failing to analyse satisfaction levels from the voice and reactions of a customer will put the bank in a position where they do not know what the customer wants. The consultant should ensure that the bank has an efficient way of being able to monitor and measure customer satisfaction. Banks that are armed with this vital information will then know what it is that makes their customers tick. Further research should reveal why certain customers want to do more business with their bank and the banks should be intelligent enough to execute further profits from this.

This was borne out by a recent worldwide survey by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories which found that 75 per cent of customers said they would give more business to a company that delivered when it came to ensuring a prompt and efficient customer service. 63 per cent of those surveyed also said that the reason they stopped doing business with a company was generally because of poor customer service experience.

"Banks do not want the cost of their consumer services to be eating into the profit margins, especially when banks are fighting over constantly shrinking profit margins due to the fact that there is very little difference in what they are offering these days." according to Mohamed Fouad from Xceed Professional Services.

Performance management is what banks are beginning to concentrate on in the battle for customer loyalty. When banks are talking about the contact experience, be it over the phone or by email, the whole principle is about the management of scale. A contact centre for a good sized bank could deal with up to 200,000 transactions per month, which is a considerable amount of volume and in that kind of situation, say consultants, consistency in service is everything. Any decent-sized bank will have hundreds of employees, thousands of customers and millions of transactions taking place and banks need to make sure that the experience from the customer's perspective is consistent.

The consultant's role is broad and may mean looking at everything from monitoring the levels of customer's complaints to training staff and reducing the turnover of skilled personnel. There has to be a defined trigger for training. It is pointless spending a lot of money training people up with useless skills just because conventional wisdom says a call centre agent has to be nice and they are carrying out these training classes when they have nothing to do with performance.

Some banks in the Middle East are beginning to pay attention. Qatar National Bank has been busy rebranding and upgrading its electronic banking channels with the launch of its EAZYLife suite of services. This includes services such as a 365 day a year customer care centre, as well as internet banking, eStatements and SMS alerts.

"Elaborate customer satisfaction surveys are carried out, twice a year, and are conducted in coordination with a reputable market research organisation," said Hoda Kassem, the manager of customer relations for HSBC. These surveys provide us with the customer service benchmarks and the customer satisfaction levels, and their progression over a period of time. The customer feedback is then shared with the relevant business areas so that appropriate improvement action plans can be developed."

There are a few numbers that consultants can look at in terms of what it is that banks actually expect out of such savings. One is from the moment that banks start measuring the defect rate in terms of when they are monitoring the transactions between the customers and the service agents. If they are not looking at them closely enough, then there is a good chance that at least 25 per cent of their calls are being done incorrectly. A high performance organisation will usually try to aim for a 2 per cent rate of mishandled calls. That would mean the difference between a quarter of all a banks calls being handled incorrectly as opposed to a fraction of that. How long banks can sustain these kinds of losses and the reputational risk that goes with it is a matter of debate, but some seem to have been ignoring the signs for a very long time.  

© Banker Middle East 2007

 

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