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Saying Thank You to Customers
A few weeks ago I met the VP of Marketing from my bank at a local business event and she asked if I would be willing to answer a series of focus group type questions as part of some research she was doing with a number of the bank's other clients.
They were standard-issue qualitative research questions but one was quite striking, not just as it relates to banks, but to so many other industries as well.
During the same week in The Wise Marketer, there was a short piece from a research report indicating that a majority of bank customers, 63%, plan to switch primary banks, with a similar percentage intending to switch insurance providers. These numbers echo an IBM study that boldly concluded that a significant majority of customers have little or no emotional connection to their bank.
With only a small handful of exceptions, namely "ThankYou" from Citibank and the new Chase Exclusives, banks have been noteworthy in their failure to embrace what we call "whole-bank" loyalty. Yes, there are thousands of credit cards out in the market with loyalty "features" but these are often the extent of a bank's loyalty marketing efforts.
There are a number of reasons for this, including a bank's product- rather than customer-centricity, largely reflecting being organized around products, in silos, rather than by customers. Of course like all industries there are exceptions, including the smaller and more nimble banks (particularly those catering to high net worth individuals and businesses).
The lack of loyalty in banking is one of great irony. While loyalty is often (and largely) a function of habit, real loyalty is driven by an emotional connection and certainly people are, for the most part, quite emotional about their money.
So the question that struck me from the bank VP Marketing? It was simply about how I thought they should thank the bank's customers. My answer: the bank should figure out how to get the customers to want to say thank you to the bank!
In order for this to happen, the bank will need to shift its focus from being product-centric and take a customer-based approach to growth. Having a customer thank them for being their bank should be the bank's ultimate objective.
Customers expect to be thanked and appreciated. But it's time to turn the tables and make customers thankful for their alignment with a particular brand. Brands of course, do not typically include this as a key goal. It's time that they should.
I totally support the fact that customer needs are not the first priority
for a lot of brands. But before pointing fingers we need to understand that
achieving complete customer satisfaction is rather an impossible task. But
yes we can work towards it. I would like to get your views on customer
centricity on our corporate blog (mahindrauniverse.com).
It's a shame, as banks were on the cutting edge of loyalty's precursor,
incentives. I'm much too young to remember the toaster give-aways, but I've
certainly heard all about them. ;)