The explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic is straining the financial markets and the entire banking sector. At this stage, banks play a crucial role in maintaining the system as they are called to guarantee the necessary liquidity to the real economy and also to transfer those intangible aspects of trust, essential to be able to embark on a path of recovery. However, the banking intermediaries are faced, at the same time, with a series of operational criticalities, including, not least, customer management and the commercial relationship.
For banks, therefore, this phase is and will be particularly delicate since, despite operational problems, it will have to be addressed by demonstrating real proximity to customers. Customer Experience management will be the major topic to work on; having to face a customer who finds himself catapulted into a completely new world. Those able to effectively manage the relationship with customers in this phase, both private and corporate, will guarantee a long-term level of loyalty and greater confidence, but the ability to generate an excellent Customer Experience will in turn be based on two basic assumptions: personalization and empathy.
Personalization, to allow banks to understand the individual context of each individual business and each person in order to better support and target the actions to be carried out. Empathy, with which instead relations and relationships with customers must be managed, both in the phase of anxiety and concern for one’s financial wealth, and with reference to the ways in which to face the exit from the crisis.
These challenges will significantly transform the relative positioning of the operators in the next 12-18 months.
The monitoring and direction of this process through the creation of surveys allow:
- the accurate reading of the demand, in terms of: expressed and latent needs, degree of use of the different channels, knowledge and understanding of the services, and brand reputation acquired by the players at this stage. These insights allow the personalization of the Institute’s communication and services.
- effective investigation of the customer experience and customer journey in the use of the Institute’s services. These insights are essential to know the gap between planned service and service provided and the consequent effect on reputation.
Focus Marketing has developed two research products:
- Focus CE (Customer Expectations): A demoscopic survey, which aims to analyze the modification of the system of preferences and habits in the use of banking operations – post-Covid – by customers, the deepening of the “critical point ”of differentiation between the Institutes and the propensity to use digital channels (web, mobile and social).
- Focus CX (Customer Experience): An Integrated Mystery Shopping investigation which is based on the involvement of mysterious customers (current and prospects of the Institute) who are involved and accompanied in a finalized contact experience (information, purchase of services) that aims to objectively reconstruct the service experience and to deepen the CX of the Institute’s customers, as well as the efficiency / effectiveness of the various touch-points: telephone channel, online channel, branch.
For more information please contact: info@focusmarketing.it
