Is Your Financial Institution Delivering on it’s Customer Promise?

In Microsoft’s annual Global State of Customer Service report,58% of customers said they would not hesitate to sever their relationship with a  company should customer service fall short of their expectations. This should not come as a surprise, considering the evolution of consumers who have become better informed and more demanding. As consumers, we tend to gravitate toward the firms that offer us the most refined customer experience. We seek out firms that offer seamless interactions, attention to our needs, and transparent communication. These  hallmarks of a superior customer experience are now the expectation, not the exception.

But how can financial services firms be sure they are delivering on customer promises and crafting a great customer experience? To answer that question, Guidehouse polled our clients to ask about their secret sauce when it comes to customer feedback. What we found was that our clients leveraged a variety of tools, techniques, metrics, and processes, but all our clients abided by certain key principles, which we distill in this article series—from survey strategy development through execution.

All of our clients mentioned that customer surveys provide a practical, affordable, and effective way for them to interact with their customers  to uncover opportunities and address challenges. Customer surveys allow firms to move beyond simply “filling orders” to provide additional  value by solving customer problems and anticipating/addressing their customers’ biggest needs. In an agile world, customer engagement enables firms to “inspect and adapt”—responding to customer feedback in real time rather than following a rigid plan. By leveraging real-time,  qualitative data, firms can more flexibly improve products and processes.

This paper provides best practices and approach to design a survey that can provide actionable insights to solve root challenges and be a  useful tool to all stakeholders. In it, our experts provide a framework that outlines how financial services firms can base their customer surveys  in a comprehensive customer engagement strategy. Each section of this framework is then analyzed in detail, offering tangible guidance on how to institute these practices and begin to realize the value of customer surveys.

Additional authors: Zachary Evans and Brian Karp