Importance of Net Promoter Score for Indian Banks
Importance of NPS® for Indian Banks
Customers are the backbone of any business. And yet a customer’s journey, loyalty and experience are a low priority for banks.
As a result of the pandemic, more users have taken to digital transactions, learning to order groceries, shopping, even doing their bank work, right from the safety of their homes. How do you then capture the interest of your customers? The one thing that you can do is improve the experience a customer has banking with you.
Banks and customer loyalty
Customer loyalty to a bank stems from the value that you can provide them. As per the 30 Elements of Value designed by Bain & Company, the biggest differentiators are quality, time-saving, reduction in anxiety, simplification of processes and if you have the potential to be a good investment for future generations.
So the question that you really need to ask yourself is, why should a customer choose your bank over the several perfectly good banks available to him?
Building loyalty: importance of net promoter score for Indian banks
Improving customer experience can help you build loyalty. It shows them that their voice is being heard and that they matter to you. An effective way to measure loyalty is the Net Promoter Score (NPS®). NPS measures how likely a customer is to recommend your bank to others.
Building loyalty not only helps you in customer retention but also helps you drive better growth and economics. The thing to also remember about NPS is, it does not just give you data on the likeliness of a recommendation. It also provides you with actionable points to help improve your customer experience, thereby impacting loyalty.
Creating customer episodes to measure experience
Understanding where you can take proactive measures to ensure a smooth and seamless customer experience is critical. You can do this by creating customer episodes. Much like a web series, customer episodes track their journey from consideration, purchase to after-sale services.
I. Consideration
This is the place where your customer is seeking information that can help them make a decision. At this stage, it’s a great idea to involve front-line employees who are the first point of contact for your customers. Do they have all the information? Can they answer questions posed to them by customers? If not, do they have the resources to seek out answers?
While some customers would speak to an executive, others may want a link to study further. Is all this information deployed on your website/app/brochures? Is it in a language easy to understand? Does it redirect to an email or a number the customer can reach out to in case of doubts?
II. Purchase
Once your customer has all the information, it is time for them to make a purchase. Is the journey from consideration to purchase seamless? How intuitive is the user interface of your website/app where the purchase is being sought?
Coming to offline interactions, how well versed are your in-branch employees with soft skills? Is your Relationship Manager knowledgeable and has the etiquette to deal with customers?
III. After-sale services
Do you have a feedback mechanism in place to capture the customer experience as they moved from one episode to the next? And once you do receive feedback, what do you do with that information? Do you take action to assuage a disgruntled customer or does the feedback lay gathering dust?
Gathering feedback is an arduous task. And with banks, a customer can have multiple entry and exit points. They may begin their journey online and finish their purchase offline. How then do you gather feedback?
Sprinkle feedback based on the journey path of a customer
Typically, any Indian bank has the following touchpoints in the journey path of a customer:
I. Branch banking experience
To measure in-branch experience, right from staff support to transaction time, etc. This touchpoint in itself covers 4 out of the 5 most important Elements of Value. Feedback on this journey path can help you improve customer-facing processes.
II. Digital banking experience
This is to measure digital banking experience with a focus on the website and app of your bank – how customer-centric it is and if the user interface is easy to navigate and customer friendly.
III. Call centre experience
When someone calls your call centre, they’re most interested in reaching a human voice as soon as possible so their queries can be resolved. Call centre experience will measure your turn around time (TAT) and quality of resolution and how well-versed your executive is with your internal processes. This can help you narrow down what kind of training they would require or where you can improve your processes.
IV. Relationship manager interactions
Measure how well is your relationship manager performing in terms of knowledge and etiquette, speed of work and growth of the business.
By gathering details in each of these journey paths, you can devise a plan of action tailored specifically for that path.
Experience measurement and Huddles
All the feedback that has been gathered on each of the journey paths that a customer is likely to take must be measured to understand the needs of the customers. Once you understand that you can build more customer-centric processes. This will also allow you to measure what the customers like and dislike, which can be used to improve customer experience.
Experience measurement will not only help you device better services but also help you in meeting business KPIs.
Huddles – where branch managers can have weekly meetings to ensure action items are noted, and any suggestions and improvements are discussed and implemented – can ensure that the feedback received is measured, analysed and put into action ASAP.
How can LitmusWorld assist you?
Our efforts have seen an increase of +36 points in NPS for a private sector bank in India over the course of 1 year.
LitmusWorld has enabled 165+ brands to improve their customer experience across customer journeys. We work on our proprietary M.A.I. framework of Measure (what customers feel), Act (close the feedback loop) and Improve (deliver business outcomes). Our efforts have seen an increase of +36 points in NPS for a private sector bank in India over the course of 1 year.
