… to build loyalty automate all customer touch-points
In various management classes and in the industry, we are preached that “CUSTOMER is the King”. It is also made to believe that everything and anything is done for the Customer. The Customer is the ultimate God around which the entire universe revolves.
Spend some time out of the marketing and you would start to wonder … IS IT!!
Multiple research highlights the thought that customer retention and satisfaction brings huge benefits in terms of cost of acquisition and getting market leadership. It also goes to highlight as how a negative word of mouth results in deteriorating market position and tattered image.
While organisations ideally want to work towards Customer value creation, they end up working primarily towards prospects and leads. The Pandemic just highlighted the gap further. The strategies, maybe driven by panic, showcased that the Customer is seen to be less important than prospects. The acquisition of business is more critical from new customers rather than existing ones.
During Pandemic, all gaps were filled to get onboarding sorted and not servicing.
Digital Transformation was on the cards for some time for organisations, the pandemic just accelerated it.
The model for doing business changed, the way we look at the acquisition and servicing became more empathetic.
Till around late 2019, a major Indian bank promoted a very famous Indian actor flying a kite and the agent onboards him with a new CASA account without him having to visit the bank branch. This was a major differentiator not just for the bank but also for the all banks in India. This was a new way of doing business and onboarding customers.
This was further extrapolated to a virtual debit card being issued within minutes for you to start transacting online.
This model however, post pandemic seems to be far fetched. Leave aside the agency banking, no one would even allow an unknown person to enter their house.
The change in business model enabled the regulatory framework to change as well. The regulators globally relooked at the most critical event for onboarding a customer, the KYC. The regulators came out with an innovative way of onboarding customers from the comfort of their homes. The document intensive processes of a customer visiting a branch was taken over by video and electronic KYC process.
In this process, the customer expresses interest for getting a CASA account, Loan, Credit Card etc.. A bank executive gets in touch with you and asks you to fill a form and schedule an appointment. A video call happens where the executive verifies your National ID documents, matches yourself with the photo on national card and validates that it is not a image or animation and actually you. Subsequently, you get onboarded. As simple as that!
Similarly, the Digital Onboarding bug bit the other industries as well. In the telecom industry, you may buy a new sim online. It is made so transparent that you may choose your number as well. The sim is issued, KYC done and delivered to your doorstep.
The efficiency, intent, regulations, logistics and the entire ecosystem is coordinated to make the onboarding happen within minutes.
These are all fabulous things and the epitome of Customer Experience, Operational Excellence and Business Innovation working in tandem to get a so very precious customer onboard. The entire process is Hyper-Automated.
If all this is happening and it is such a rosy picture, why the title of the blog?
In this entire process, we forget one small difference. A difference which the marketing Guru’s kept on harping around.
Lets move to the basic definitions.
According to first hit on Google of Verve-Creative
“Read any marketing advice these days and the terms leads, prospects and customers are used – but what is the difference between them, and how do you work out where they come from? In simple terms, a lead is someone who has expressed an interest in your business, and who has given you their contact details. A prospect is someone you have had a discussion with and sent a quote to A customer is someone who has purchased something from you. Your customers come from prospects and leads that have been turned into sales.”
Leads conversion to prospects and further conversion/ onboarding as Customers is so well defined and such emphasis is being made on making it frictionless and smooth. If a prospect abandons the journey midway, the companies build ways to get them back. There are ways and methods to make them work seamlessly across devices. Queries and exceptions are addressed in the best possible way. In short all ways and means are adopted to make the onboarding experience a pleasure. An experience that would be talked about.
Lets look at the other side of the journey. The transition of the lead/ prospect to a Customer.
With the past experience the feeling is that of joy, top of the world and that inner confidence of being someone special. After all, who does not enjoy pampering.
The first experience to get something done post the onboarding is where the nightmare begins as the organisations don’t focus on it.
This transpires across all industries and verticals.
Lets consider the highly regulated Banking, Financial Services, Insurance and Telecom industry for now.
Remember, we talked about cross sell and upsell and that being the key driver for growth once we have a customer. Well, that experience is shattered once the customer asks for an additional product. The banks processes does not differentiate between a prospect or a customer. They are asked to submit all the forms, documents and the entire verification continues. The end result Customer Confusion, Agony and ultimately opting it from any other bank. If the bank cannot treat a customer in a differentiated way, why should the customer. There goes our pitch for cross sell and upsell.
This could have been easily averted by linking accounts, centralizing documents and have a differentiated strategy for working with Customers.
Before the banks moved to Core Banking Systems (CBS), they worked on Total Banking Automation (TBA) Systems. This meant that the branch was the custodian of all the information and literally owned the customer. The customer was tied to the HOME BRANCH. This concept gave way with the introduction of CBS and centralization of the Customer Information. To be more precise, either a CBS or CRM did the job.
Ideally, the millennials would not understand this as in their generation, one could seamless transact from any branch anywhere in the world. According to a study conducted by CACI, a typical consumer will visit a bank branch just four times a year by 2022.
Lets consider a few more scenarios to prove that Prospects are the King and not Customers.
COVID made people transact electronically which resulted in fewer checks been written, lesser money withdrawn from the ATMs and ultimately a lot of accounts going dormant. With the opening of things, people started to get back into routine. Which meant they needed the accounts to be active. Which meant converting the Dormant account to Active account.
The shock of a lifetime awaited them once they entered into the bank branch.
Assuming the vKYC and other pleasing things were done for the new account, one expected that the process of the conversion of Dormant to Active account would be a cakewalk. However, it seems the tech advancement and regulatory changes had not affected this side. The executive still asks you to fill tens of forms, go to your base branch, get all the account holders in front of the executive and sign the form in their witness.
The problem becomes multiplied if it is a joint account and accounts holders still don’t reside in same city/state or country. Please forget this money.
CONFUSED!!
In an age of CBS, why does one need a HOME BRANCH? With the advent of e/v-kyc, why does one need to be present in front of the executive physically?
The harassment is killing as no-one has put their minds into giving proper service to a customer.
The list simply continues, have you ever considered closing an account. You need to visit the “HOME BRANCH”, give all your details and then only it would be closed. Add to it the misery of getting all account holders to the same place.
Well, maybe the Banking industry is skewed and the regulatory processes are not designed for the customer. But this is not true. The other industries too are skewed.
Lets move to the telecom industry.
You want a new SIM, you can apply online. You can even choose your number and the same would be delivered at your doorstep within a few hours, if not minutes. Of course, you would still need to show your national ID card for KYC to happen. It is surprising to note that something as vKYC hasn’t reached the telecom industry but that is for another time.
A beautiful experience indeed!!
Now, once you have been onboarded and are a loyal customer, you expect the same efficiency while requesting services. This is where you are in for a shock.
Try requesting for a replacement SIM. Your old SIM has gone bad due to some reason and you want a duplicate SIM.
Would it be delivered to you, just like while procuring a new one? NO!
You would need to visit the branch, submit your ID proof, pay for it (remember, for a new SIM you don’t need to pay), get your photos clicked and then you would get a duplicate SIM.
The experience just brings the loyalty down.
These examples are simply everywhere in our day to day operations in dealing with the customer facing industries.
The REGTECH WAR would continue and the customers would be the people who would be hurt the most.
Is there a Solution? YES!
The solution lies in the thought process of making that difference in the customer service as well. Extending the experience in the servicing area as well.
Sometimes, the industry might know this is hampering things and can be used as a differentiator if done well. They don’t even know that Technology exists to make this happen.
While the Digital Transformation has happened but it is mostly towards the Customer experience layer. Also, the regulators and the business seem to have focused towards the onboarding processes.
For a true Digital Acceleration to happen the industry has to do more. At the end of the day, it is about bringing together the Customer Experience, Operational Excellence and Business Innovation, all in a combined force.
These have to be done really quick to adapt to the ever changing business scenarios.
Digital Acceleration is somewhere becoming synonymous to Hyper Automation where a host of technologies as App Development Tools, Automation Tools, Data Science Tools, Integration Tools all come together to deliver the experience that is so desired by CUSTOMERS.
A summarization of the same is presented as below of how Gartner looks at the HyperAutomation story which covers interfaces and low code, automation, integration and analytics and AI.
The idea is to do it enterprise-wide to yield true results.
In conclusion, with the COVID settling in as a reality and organisations start rethinking on their Digital Strategy, HyperAutomation and its application to Customer Service would play a big role. Organisations have realized that they need to look beyond Onboarding and complete the value cycle. This would mean relooking at the Regulatory frameworks, adopting technology and creating that difference for the servicing and in true sense declaring CUSTOMER to be the King!
