Banking: A Service desert

Good service from a customer perspective is one of the key reasons for choosing a bank. Within the other hand, banks will usually understood under the service counter area unpleasant. Accordingly, often the large gap between the experienced and the service is promised at banks.

Googling for you "service in banks", we get a lot of evidence of poor service. If you ask friends or acquaintances on the service experience at banks, so the picture looks not much different: Mostly criticism, little praise. The concept of "Service desert Germany" seems to be created for banks.

Customer engagement as a central objective

It has long been proven that good service and business success are closely positively correlated. Two important keywords and gradually make it clear this place in the banking sector by: Customer Engagement and Customer Experience.
 
Under Customer Engagement is the ability to inspire customers. From a Harvard study , we know that this can lead to an increase in customer profitability by over 20%.

Customer Experience, also a term from the Harvard Business School is known, a company's ability to bring about all the sales channels of communication and positive experiences that make a crucial difference from a customer perspective in the competition.

To bank customers to inspire positive experience high service quality is an important if not crucial. And this is where banks do all confessions, despite often difficult.

Is the term "Service" burned?

A few years ago thought about it a major German bank to introduce a different concept for their stores. They tried something new and more meaningful.

These include surveys were conducted and reviewed various term variants for approval and acceptance by customers and employees. From the perspective of the bank it was hoped above all to the term "advisory branch." Clear favorite was from a customer perspective but the term "Service branch". Unfortunately, this was also the term with the worst approval rating among the employees.

Even if this action is a long time ago and has not yet implemented this, but it reveals the problems of the term "service" in the banking sector.

The term "service" for bank employees often have little "value". Do you mean by "service" in short and simplified "counter service" and want it most as quickly as possible away.

Bank customers "love" good service

For customer service, however is something important, and often something crucial. Good or bad service makes for a lot of customers from the difference between a good and a bad bank.

This is especially true because products have become more or less interchangeable. A global study by management consultancy Bain from 2010 to approximately 90,000 individuals were interviewed, says that service was the deciding factor for a retail bank.

Product range and the level of charges on the other hand are secondary. The study comes to three key findings:

1. Service quality determines satisfaction and loyalty of bank customers
2. Banks with a high number of loyal customers are more successful and cheaper to refinance
3. In a survey of about 90,000 residential customers direct banks cut the best and the worst performing large branch banks

One of the authors of the study, combined, for example, respondents with the term "service" that you will be greeted when you walk into a bank branch. Many bank customers would sometimes feel, however, to interfere with the entry . Notably, this would apply to wealthy clients.
 
Nothing new. Already in 2007, came a study by Booz Allen Hamilton to similar results. Frightening, is that banks seem to learn little from these results apparently.

Customers have certainly supports clear ideas about what they associate with good and poor service:

Characteristics of good and bad customer service from bank perspective

Actually, the above points should make it a particular challenge to banks.

All the more so, why banks not change that. Or do they communicate their good service not only right for the customer?
 
Or, as Jim Bush (Executive Vice President, Services at American Express) expressed on the Forrester's Customer Experience Forum 2011 is: "Treat the customer as you would like to be treated."
 
What do you mean? They have particularly good or particularly bad experiences in the service of the banks do? Whether as customer or as an employee, tell us of it here.