First Direct Are Wrong — Customer Engagement Is Their Differentiator
First, I have a confession to make: I love the First Direct brand.
From their television adverts with Barry the platypus to their being a major bank headquartered in Yorkshire (God’s own county), they’re a real success story in British finance. Their focus on the people who bank with them has also been incredibly refreshing in an industry which hasn’t always been the greatest at customer relationships.
In a recent article on Marketing Week, First Direct’s Head of Brand and Marketing, Zoe Burns-Shore, has spoken out about taking their headline marketing away from customer care:
“The reality is good customer service now comes with the territory — it’s just something people expect in the Amazon age. On its own, it isn’t enough of a brand differentiator anymore.”
To that end, Burns-Shore goes on to say:
“Repositioning the brand in a more modern way makes the most sense.”
Now of course, benefits, human interest stories, product/service features, and more, all have a place in the way a brand speaks to its market. Indeed, customer service as a phrase immediately puts people in mind of post-sale issue-resolutions, bringing up images of call centres and cost lines, which every business would like to do without. But this is a very nuanced view of customer service, which focuses on dealing with customers on an interaction basis.
I humbly disagree with this argument, and believe First Direct should continue to focus on the customer. I also believe their decision has in part been made due to focusing in on customer service, when they should instead be focusing on customer engagement.
Why Brands Need Customer Engagement
The view of customer service Burns-Shore alludes to above, focuses on separate interactions with a customer to provide specific assistance to a problem. But to us at Gnatta customer engagement is the lifetime conversation between your customer and your brand. From the initial use of your website FAQ’S, to the pre-sales chat with your team, to post-sale; this conversation lasts for the duration of your relationship. It is one, long entity, not a set of divided interactions.
This relationship requires the ability to speak to every person who wishes to speak to you, at the right time, with the right information, via the channel they choose. It is not an easy goal to achieve as a corporation, and First Direct deserve massive respect for what they’ve achieved in this so far. Notably, reclaiming top spot in the KPMG Nunwood’s customer experience excellence rankings in September last year was a tremendous achievement.
Companies such as Monzo and Starling are already causing huge disruption in the finance sector with their digital first approach. For an established bank to challenge the disruptors on their own turf is a brave and — most importantly — correct, position to take.
However, changing from their customer service to a customer engagement view would fundamentally reinvent First Direct. They would become a bank where the customer retains the control over every interaction. By embracing this position, First Direct would have a truly unique place in the market and one from which they could continue to see great success.
Omnichannel in Customer Engagement
In the Marketing Week interview, Burns-Shore makes a very compelling point about the importance of digital forming part (rather than the whole) of their offering:
“We’ve asked our customers if they’d prefer First Direst to be digital only … Around 75% of all our transactions are now made digitally so it’s a huge opportunity, but we also have a great services proposition and that’s a real asset against the new players.”
This acknowledged, and importantly respected, split between digital and offline channels within First Direct, demonstrates the importance of an omnichannel strategy in today’s world. A popular buzzword, omnichannel is, in fact, vital within customer engagement.
The need for this approach is well established when one looks at a stereotypical customer journey in today’s banking climate. To illustrate this, I am going to simulate a recent experience I had with a bank:
- Morning, on my commute: I need to shift some money around but have a problem in my account. I tweet the bank to ask who I need to speak to and, after moving me into direct messages, they direct me to the right department.
- Lunchtime, at work: I live chat with that department to get to the bottom of my issue and we resolve it.
- Evening, whilst on the bus home: I realise I had a quick, unrelated question and Facebook message the bank to ask it as a follow up.
In each of these instances, I had to start from the beginning with my initial question, as the (different) advisor I spoke to each time could only deal with the information they had on their system. As the channels were different, they didn’t have my previous conversation history. Note, this was just in the online world. As you can imagine, if I’d brought telephony into the situation, it could have been even more confusing for everyone.
This experience is typical for businesses beyond the finance sector. With many industries now offering this multichannel approach as standard, this is an increasingly regular occurrence. In a multichannel strategy, the customer can use a variety of channels to get in touch but will receive an isolated experience on each one.
This is now old school, as linked-up omnichannel systems have taken over. With our recent launch of SMS and imminent introduction of telephony, Gnatta have also moved beyond the digital landscape and broken down the barrier into the offline world.
Software providers, such as Gnatta and others, have taken these multichannel capabilities and provided a centralised layer which ensures every channel exists in sync with each other. With this technology, those advisors who received my Facebook message at the end of the day would automatically be given the relevant information from my twitter/DM/webchat conversations from earlier. This is what we mean by omnichannel customer engagement, this is what we mean by a lifetime customer conversation, and this is the position that First Direct can continue to win in their sector with.
Why the Human Touch Still Matters
Finally, Burns-Shore makes a very pertinent point about the importance of humanity within customer engagement:
“Around mortgages and complex banking issues people like to be reassured that there’s a human on the other end of the phone waiting to help them.”
Again, she is very right to espouse the importance of live, human interactions within a brand’s engagement strategy (something challenger banks such as Starling are doing exceptionally well from my own experience). It is important to note though, that as brands need an omnichannel strategy, they also need to combine a multi-layered setup over this:
1: Self-serve — Although its lack of labour cost and potential for reducing overheads has increased its popularity, self-serve is not a viable customer engagement strategy on its own.
2: Human to human — Brands today still need human empathy, decision making, and emotional response to help provide the engagement levels their customers want. However, there is now an integral third way between self serve and human interaction.
3: Bots/Automation — The growth of AI, especially messenger bots, is well documented and I don’t intend to go into it here (for a great overview of AI in customer engagement see here). Every future-thinking brand is considering what role machine learning will hold and where it will fit alongside human teams.
Burns-Shore hits the nail on the head when she stands up to the seemingly growing view that bots and self-serve are the only way a company can scale its customer engagement in a busy sector. However, as with the multichannel to omnichannel approach, this strategy requires all three parts working in tandem to be successful. This cohesive approach is an important part of customer engagement, and again is a step up from the original view of customer service.
The technology exists to make this work. Indeed, if First Direct, as a brand, can get this right, I predict a bright future for them in their market. At only 28 years of age, this is a business at a great age to utilise the infrastructure and experience advantages it has over challenger banks, whilst still being adaptive enough to lead its customers’ trends.
To really win, of course, First Direct must retain their focus on their customers. This means replacing their outdated view of customer service with an understanding and appreciation of customer engagement. I, for one, will be hoping this is something Barry the platypus and his team will succeed with.
