Are you connected to your customer ... or to thin air?

• Author: Clapp, Bruce
• Position: Customer Retention - Survey

As I travel the country and talk with bankers of all sizes and locations, one aspect of the conversations is consistent ... their need to better understand how and why customers act. In most cases, their drive for knowledge is from the acquisition side and that, in a nutshell, is part of the problem. Bankers seem to have trouble aligning themselves with the customer; especially when it involves ensuring retention.

Vox, a Chicago-based customer experience consultant recently completed an interesting study of bankers and consumers. The survey points out the connection--or lack thereof--bankers have when it comes to understanding their customer actions. Asking the stone series of questions to bankers and customers, the survey generated some answers that were in stark contrast. When asked the main reason for customer defection, 73 percent of the bankers indicated rates and fees were the cause. For consumers, only 11 percent responded that rates and fees drove their defection. When it comes to why a customer stays, 45 percent of bankers indicated it was the financial partnership created the kept the customer at the bank. In further contradiction, consumers said only 7 percent of the time did they feel they even had a financial partnership with their bank.

Compounding this issue is recent research reporting that 69 percent of customers are indifferent or skeptical of developing a relationship with their financial Institution.

You need to know your customer

So what does this tell us? We need to ask more questions and move from our "instincts" and Intuition and more into defined knowledge from our customer. We can track channel usage, product purchase tendencies and retention trends. Each provides secondary insight into the overall actions we can predict our...