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Improve customer loyalty by blending art and science

December 6, 2012 by Guest Contributor

Research shows that investing in superior customer management easily can exceed returns of 20 percent in the first year of implementation. A return that compounds in subsequent years as a results of customer-centric strategies that drive customer's loyalty, new customer referrals, and increased revenue opportunities. Customer loyalty is a key driver that differentiates retail banks when trying to retain existing and attract new customers. And cited by customers themselves as the way to win their business today.

Achieving superior customer management, however, can be expensive and operationally prohibitive; and let's not to forget to mention there are a number of different approaches that aim to meet such a standard, but fail because critical qualitative insights are not captured in back-end systems of record (SOR). These "black-box" strategies struggle to be widely adopted across the enterprise and die a slow, internal political death – with wasted resources left on the floor. It also leaves the customer feeling frustrated and dissatisfied, maybe even ready to flee. One such example was recently illustrated in an article in Credit Union Times.

Changing the retail bank's approach to adopt best practices in developing holistic customer-centric strategies is paramount to the improvement of the customer experiences, and the bottom line. Quantitative data alone can represent only a partial view of reality whereas holistic customer strategies exploit the full value of the enterprise by synthesizing customer knowledge from SOR with external off-your firm financial information and critical qualitative input from customer-facing staff. Customer-facing staff are critical in the adoption of such strategies and need to be actively engaged to extract customer learnings that will lead to the modification and alignment of customer-level treatement strategy designs and predictive models with the real world.

A collaborative approach, blending art and science, ensures complete adoption across the enterprise and measurable customer experience improvements that can be monetized for shareholders through improved customer retention and new customer acquisitions. Get access to details on the framework to design and deploy such customer-centric strategies.