In my previous blog post, titled From Service Culture to Sales Culture – Really? … Really! I talk about how customer service is at the core of retail banking however the fundamentals of the sales process found in other industries is not present in retail banking. A recent survey from the Boston Consulting Group found that there were five key trends in the approaches that premier-league banks use to achieve operational excellence:
- Strengthening the customer experience
- Increasing sales performance
- Improving end-to-end productivity
- Enhancing organizational efficiency
- Reducing complexity
In the report, Client Excellence is defined as “Succeed in ‘moments of truth’ for the customer, providing effective sales and service across channels, contacting and assisting customers proactively, and delivering ‘easy to buy, easy to sell, easy to service’ products with key features that are instantly functional.”
This can easily be addressed by implementing Recommendation Guides and Analytics. A correct and complete product recommendation at the point of sale is the first step in good retailing.
- While engaging a customer or a prospect, customer service reps in the call center as well as the branch input demographic customer information into the recommendation guide. The recommendation guide with give the service rep products and product bundles that meet the customer’s needs and meet the bank’s eligibility requirements. This immediately helps reduce the complexity of product selection as well as strengthens the customer experience.
- The branch manager can run daily/weekly/monthly reports that will tell them what has been recommended, what has been sold, and the gap between the two. This helps the branch manager manage the team to increase sales performance and enhance organizational efficiency.
- For those customers that fall within the “gap”, the service reps have an additional opportunity to proactively reach out to the customer strengthening the customer relationship and improving end-to-end productivity.
Using Recommendation Guides in conjunction with analytics, retail banks can make their products easy to buy, easy to sell, and easy to service while creating customer loyalty.
