Bank customers, particularly those of the larger banks, are used to email and phone inquiries about recent branch or online transactions. Survey results can drive critical decisions about how to transform or close an existing bank branch, or how to evaluate staff performance, with the granting of bonuses strongly in the mix.
Bill Bannon, president of Bannon & Co., a Mass.-based market research firm with a focus on community financial institutions, says his company always asks clients the reason for the survey and what they plan to do with the results. (Disclosure: Bannon & Co. prepares the surveys for The Commercial Record, published by The Warren Group.) For banks that have merged or have acquired other banks, the results are important, Bannon said.
Mathematical rating scores are important, but “customers are people, and verbatim comments provide the skin and bones element,” he said, particularly for low-satisfaction comments on particular issues, which include follow-ups on specific situations.
Webster Bank Learns A Lesson
Webster Bank, headquartered in Waterbury, has reaped good results from its 2012 implementation of a customer service platform with Allegiance, a customer-service survey specialist. Previously, the bank, which has $22 billion in assets and 165 branch offices, had measured customer satisfaction though lengthy questionnaires, with managers using the data to set up service level goals and incentive programs for bank center managers. It provided a big-picture outlook but few specific insights. In search of a solution that would provide both big-picture and granular results, the bank elected a customer platform that would allow it to revamp its customer-survey activities to include transactional feedback for banking centers, online and business banking customer interactions, as well as implementing dozens of ad hoc surveys on the platform.
The findings: Shorter surveys were more effective for overall customer service as opposed to comparing one branch to another.
Jennifer Salara Hoynes, senior vice president of brand management at Webster Bank, said finding out what the negative point, or “dissatisfier” is, versus looking at a spreadsheet, provides more guidance to problems. “The key is the alert, and [having] customers talk to someone, and us delivering,” she said.
Once the platform was implemented, one in 10 Webster Bank customers who initially gave negative reviews ended up signing up for additional services after having their initial problem resolved. “Where there’s an unmet need, we are able to have a conversation based on that need- based approach,” Hoynes said.
She doesn’t think social media will replace the survey. For one thing, not all social media participants are bank customers. “It’s helpful to get the voice of the customer and consumer, and using social media [is only one approach],” she said.
Controlling The Exchange
Bannon agreed that social media won’t take the place of surveys, because social media and online surveys attract the extremes. Bank-generated phone surveys provide better control of responses, whether it’s choosing customers by accounts held and/or balances, geography and age, if it’s available. But survey customers should also be chosen with an element of randomness and the imposition of a reasonable margin of error.
Bannon & Co.’s response rate is 15 percent to email surveys, but he said it’s more important to consider the total number of responses – the higher that is, the more reliable the data. Millennial respondents prove to be particularly difficult to reach, he said.
Infer What You Imply
A famous phrase from the legal profession is, to paraphrase: “Never ask a question to which you don’t know the answer.” That’s the province of Personetics Technologies Ltd., which provides predictive interactive software for the banking industry. President David Sosna said today’s technology can track responses and allow surveyors to derive a lot of insight before presenting questions to customers. It takes more time up front, but the results are more specific, he indicated.
An example: Personetics found that customers used the service for regularly recurring utility bills, but not for credit card payments. It turns out that some customers didn’t know they had a choice of paying either a preferred set amount or the minimum balance, as an alternative to the full balance. A standard survey would have required an unrealistically large sample size.
The other thing about presenting the question “tell me what you think” is that it must be implemented in a very thoughtful way, Sosna said.
For example, he said, if customer contact is conducted through a more interactive route, whether through interactive voice response or on the web, with customer-sensitive questions, “that is probably a better time to get an opinion.”
Customers’ gravitation to digital communication is inevitable, so automation of responses is the best way to start gathering information. But an open questionnaire – the kind that includes a follow-on question, “Why did you say that?” – provides greater depth.
“I don’t think you can cover everything with one approach. [Not to ask a] customer for their opinion, but to try to derive it from the input you’re collecting,” Sosna said. “We believe in the power of analytics to arrive at conclusions.”
Email: coneill@thewarrengroup.com
