Over 50% of financial companies fail to respond to online inquiries?
More than half of UK banks, insurance companies and building societies fail to respond to online customer queries.
That is one of the findings in a new study of 52 financial services companies in the UK and Germany by IBM and software company Kana. The survey found that 53% of organisations fail to respond to online queries while 35% do not provide an email address and only 29% provide a secure email facility.
The findings come at a time when financial institutions are looking for new ways to improve the customer experience and serve a growing population of younger custom
The study, “Online Customer Service: International Financial Services. KANA and IBM” found that many top British banks and building societies offer only limited web self-service options and fail to respond to email queries.
The research tested the quality of online customer service offered by each organisation by attempting to find the answer to a typical customer query through the available online channels. These included any help facilities offered on the companies’ websites and, where available, customer service email channels. Simple queries were used, such as “What savings accounts do you offer? What are the interest rates?” or “How do you ensure that the internet banking you provide is secure?”
The study revealed opportunities for banks to significantly upgrade their online experience by blending communication channels with knowledge capabilities to provide customers with consistent, accurate answers.
While a majority of the UK companies had websites that gave contact telephone numbers (97%) and multiple contacts (74%), few provided modern communication methods such as web-forms (53%), and none provided a web-chat option.
It seems more work needs to be done to provide channels that protect modern consumers, with only 29% of banks surveyed providing encrypted and secure communication channels and over two-thirds providing non-encrypted communication, leaving consumers vulnerable to online theft and cyber eavesdropping.
With regards to speed and accuracy of response, 47% of UK banks and building societies provided a satisfactory response, with 53% of companies unable to answer the test query via online channels.
The survey rated the companies on the breadth of online customer channels they offered, and the quality of responses received in those channels.
UK companies had a mediocre score for web self-service with the majority of companies scoring between 3 and 6 out of 10
Marchai Bruchey, chief marketing officer at Kana said: “We were surprised at the poor level of customer service revealed by the study, especially with UK banks and building societies being so reliant on a superior customer experience to differentiate their brands. With internet access in nearly 16 million UK households, there is growing consumer demand for a quality online experience, and more consistency between Web and branch. Any business that ignores online communication channels does so at their peril – in the competitive world of retail banking, this is especially true.”