Cut Costs, Improve Experiences & Retain Customers

We just wrapped an interesting case study with a financial institution, our goal is three fold – reduce expenses, improve customer experiences and customer retention. Our first step was to define customer retention – we realized that retaining the customer was not just having them keep their money in the bank, retaining the customer required interaction, up-sells and insuring that the customer came to us for all their financial transactions.

Next we listed all the paper mailed to the customer, to that we added the cost of preparing/ sending paper statements – needless to say we were more than a little surprised to see how much money was being spent. We engaged a few members of the call center to proactively reach out to customers in hopes of converting customers to the email program, all with the goal of reducing expenses.

Next we tried to maximize every contact opportunity with the client. We realized that the customer spent time online; we tracked what they did and captured reverse preferences in a contact management database available to the CSRs – now, every time the customer contacted the bank, we had a frame of reference. Rather than selling the customer directly, we provided …

We next came up with the plan of being extremely prompt in our follow up, every inquiry was quickly acted upon and every transaction was acknowledged (across all channels.) The customer’s questions were answered expeditiously and we introduced a transactional survey to help them keep score on us. Additionally, we shared the report card back with the customer – an effective strategy to help retention.

As an FI, use this three-pronged approach to draft an effective plan to retain customers and engage new prospects, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can influence the relationships with your customers/ members.

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