A tale of two banks

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Winning with CX
Published in
5 min readJan 17, 2018

After spending many years abroad, I feel that I really took good customer service for granted. I recall my poor experience of opening a joint bank account in Kenya, and it really surprised me how customer experience was almost neglected from the bank’s account opening process.

I’ve mapped my experience for a portion of this journey and compared it to an account opening process I experienced while in the UK:

What’s the key thing that jumps out at you?

You’ll notice a stark difference between the two banks but should the standards of our local banks be really that much lower compared to a foreign bank? Should the account opening process have been this difficult, given that it is the first critical step that forges the relationship between the bank and its customer? How would the customer experience compare for other critical customer touch points, when it is so poor for a simple process?

Journey mapping

I am sure this bank had a rigorously documented account opening process and standard operating procedures that their employees had to abide to.

The problem with process maps is that they are usually presented from an internal perspective and don’t necessarily articulate a customer’s emotions, motivations or intricacies.

Good companies instead, engage their customers when designing these processes and utilise human centred design (HCD) techniques to ensure they actually are customer-centric.

If this bank had adopted customer journey mapping, they would have been able to identify what the customer pain points and barriers are within the account opening process, how they could be fixed, as well as determining when and how customer data needs to be shared in order to provide the customer with a seamless experience.

Technology and data as an enabler

The bank has failed to take advantage of technology that would have enabled the account opening process to be much quicker and easier for the customer.

This would have also saved the bank on operational expenses.

Most banks’ use of technology within Kenya seems limited to allowing customers digital access to their accounts and using less paper based communication. A lot of the banking processes still seem to be stuck in the previous generation.

A further observation during the account opening process is the lack of intelligent use of customers’ data. I risked taking out a credit card with the same bank after I was eventually satisfied that all my issues had been resolved and I had a working account.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, when I was advised that I had to fill in yet another lengthy form at a branch. The information and KYC (Know Your Customer) documents that were requested on the form had already been captured on the original account opening form. Therefore, the bank already had access to all my data and relevant documents! When I queried as to why I had to fill in this form and re-supply photographs and identity documents; I was given a very robotic response that this was ‘standard procedure’ for the bank as it was a different team that issues credit cards vs. account opening.

Empower the employee

There was a general lack of empathy shown to me by various staff and they also did not want to go over and above their predefined roles and responsibilities.

Successful businesses have demonstrated that it is key for employees to operate as if they felt like they owned the business and to have an employee culture that has a strong focus on customer experience.

This means empowering employees to make the right decision for the customer and not necessarily having to stick to a predefined script and escalation process. Zappos, as an example, does really, really well at this.

Forget about comparing yourself to your peers

The days of when companies could compare themselves against their peers and competitors are long gone! When customers have a great experience with another brand (even if it’s not in the same business sector), they will demand the same of your business!

Companies are increasingly delivering experiences to the customer that are quicker and more personal; and that is the expectation that customers will have for your brand too.

Closing comments…

Banks need to stop taking their customers for granted; as they already face a real risk of being replaced by alternate forms of finance.

A recent report by Citibank indicated that Kenyans own as much as 2.3% (KES 163 billion) of the national GDP in bitcoin (likely even higher if you add in the other crypto-currencies)! With poor customer service, the risk of banks becoming insolvent and the banks’ reluctance to lend; customers will look elsewhere.

We’re already seeing how much of an impact FinTech is having on the banking sector and we are going to see even more players emerge in the digital payments and peer to peer lending space.

Many thanks to Akshay Shah for this story.

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