Are Banks Ready for the CMA to Publish Their NPS Scores Next Year?

Mats Rennstam discusses how customer advocacy will soon become critical for banks, whilst outlining how you can quickly boost your NPS.

In 2018, customer advocacy will become even more critical for banks as the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) plan to publish service quality metrics for the first times becomes a reality. This is part of their large “Making banks work harder for you” initiative.

Prospective banking customers will be able to easily identify how well banks are performing and make their choice based on, amongst other metrics, Net Promoter Score.

In Autumn 2016, we discovered that the banking and insurance sectors had the highest NPS and C-SAT scores, when compared with other sectors, including Financial Services, Utility, Retail, Media, Housing, Transport & Travel and Public Sector.

Challenger banks are further improving in this area, outperforming the number one bank since 1989. On the whole, customers are actually quite satisfied with their banks, but still many are scoring as low as a 19 point NPS score.

So it may be important that underperforming banks acknowledge and act on the following points to get the effect (normally a 20-percentage points uplift) needed before Jan 1, 2018.

Accountability

If customer feedback is not broken down to agent and branch level, they will not be able to drive change. Adding alerts for bad scores will also support the retention process.

Monitor the full customer journey / look beyond customer service

A company is only as strong as its weakest link, so make sure there is full visibility of all channels and touchpoints. Dissatisfaction arises outside of contact centres in a majority of cases but we pay dearly to handle it there.

Putting text analytics in place enables you to present the operational team with “Top 10 customer gripes” and have them stop other departments doing stupid things to your customers.

You could also add a question to your transactional surveys asking “Did you try and solve your query online/ in app before you called us?”, and you will see that there is £Ms wasted on malfunctioning self-service features.

Link customer feedback with performance and employee engagement

You will be amazed by the additional insight you get from looking into the correlation between customer feedback, performance and employee engagement.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) also approves of this way of measuring productivity since it includes customer satisfaction.

For more information, visit www.brightindex.co.uk