Retail bank sales and services unit6

1. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Personal Services
Product Knowledge
The Competitive Environment
Selling Skills
Customers Service
Sales Interviews
MODULE COVERAGE
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Introduction to Marketing
Customer Relationship Management

2. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Definition of customer service and customer delight
Customer service
• Whatever the definition, customer service is a conscious habit of focusing on and
continually satisfying all the customers, developed into a culture by an organization that
seeks sustainability and growth.
• It is common knowledge among business people that the profitability of any company
depends on the extent to which people external to the company make up their minds to
use the services of or buy goods produced by it.
• In the case of an increasingly competitive market like that of banking, this makes customer
service a more critical key success determinant.
• Customer service is a sellable commodity, but most companies are not cashing in on it.
Companies are so focused on sales and cost cutting that they can’t see service as a
commodity when it is right in front of them.
• In Uganda’s banking sector with its fierce competition, more effort is often put on selling,
to the neglect of customer care. In most banks and other financial institutions, customer
care remains a ‘lip’ service.
• Scouts of sales staff go out and get customers who, in many cases, open accounts and later
find out that customer care is lacking or inadequate.
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3. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
A bank that is committed to providing quality customer service does the
following:
a) Regularly checks to ensure that the customers are satisfied with the
products and services. This can be done by mainstreaming customer
satisfaction surveys into normal operations.
b) Seeks out customer complaints and relishes the opportunity to resolve them
rather than proving that the bank is right and the customer is wrong.
c) Actively solicits customer suggestions for improvements and builds the
ideas into different operations.
d) Works to discover new ways of meeting customers’ evolving needs.
e) Strives to exceed customers’ expectations.
f) Has dedicated customer care officers and account relationship managers
who own relationships with their respective portfolios of customers.
•
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4. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Customer delight as a superior practice
• The concept and reality of customer service developed from a realization that competition
affected most sectors of many economies and that customer satisfaction is a great tool of
survival and advancement. Advancement beyond customer service has now emerged,
commonly called customer delight.
• This means exceeding customer expectations and keeping the customer pleasantly
surprised at how much more care and value they get beyond what they expect. If the
treatment the customer receives is better than expected, that is excellent customer
service. It delights the customer into continual patronage of the organization.
• Banks that will seek to lead the market on a sustainable basis need to get customer delight
off the shelf of lip service and public adverts into their real operations in creating customer
experience.
• For any bank that will survive the future, customer delight is a must. Managers, officers and
staff, need to ask themselves at the end of each day; did I exceed my customers’
expectations today? What could I have done better and how can I improve tomorrow?
Customer delight springs from a healthy attitude towards one’s work, other people and
society as a whole.
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5. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Responsibility for creating excellent customer service
• Customer service should be institution-wide, not just an issue for frontline staff. It
is about attitude and exceeding expectations; delivering and maintaining high
levels of service (including processes, products and procedures). This means
listening to customers expectations, discovering factors that drive customers’
perception of service quality, and doing what it takes to respond in a way that
delights the customer.
• Everyone serves the customer. Excellent customer service leads to the repeat sale
and the referral. Excellent customer service is not an activity: it is a way of life, a
culture and a habit that ought to be the working style of every staff member.
• Customer service begins at the top. Executive management sets the tone for
customer service by how the company treats its staff.
• Customer delight starts with practicing sound and excellent customer service in-
house. In a bank, outstanding customer service practices would mean that
managers, board members and staff treat each other with the courtesy that
external clients deserve. The supervisors, managers, peers, junior staff and other
members of the team are all “customers” and need to be treated with the respect
and dignity demanded if they were an external customer.
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6. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
How to create excellent customer service
To create excellent customer service, a bank needs excellent products, delivered in a timely
manner, at an appropriate price, in an easy to access location with clearly communicated
benefits (creating a customer centric service). The major variables include all 8 Ps;
• Product – the design and range of products and services offered, including customer
rewards and incentives should solve problems, anticipate needs and capture opportunities
• Price – what customers have to pay to access your products and services, including
transaction and opportunity costs Prices should be transparent, easy to calculate and
competitive.
• Process – the speed, accuracy, clarity, responsiveness and reliability of your delivery
systems. These should be flexible enough to accommodate special needs or circumstances,
fast; no delays or bottlenecks have minimal handovers, no redundant steps, confidential,
simple and reliable.
• Promotion – information about who you are and what you have to offer. It should be clear
and accurate. Communication of benefits, costs, conditions, procedures should be in an
easy to understand language and format. There should also be timely notices/ publicity of
changes made
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7. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
• Position – this refers to the expectations you raise about who you are and what
you deliver in relation to the competition. It can be enhanced by commitment to
delivering a particular type of value in the market and delivery of what has been
promised consistently.
• Place – comfort of your service outlets i.e. nearby location, convenient opening
hours, secure, comfortable environment (lighting, space, ventilation, etc.)
• Physical Evidence – the visible presentation of your products and services should
show cleanliness, organization, creativity, attractiveness and identifiable. The
processes should be documented and records kept (evidence) in ways that your
customers come to know, understand and follow with ease
• People – Staff’ role in customer service cannot be overstated. They need to be
caring, competent, informed, motivated, respectful, attentive, welcoming. This
does not only refer to front line staff, but even to the support people and lead
managers who are supposed to exercise excellent internal customer service.
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8. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Creating a customer-centric organization
This means looking at the 8Ps from a customer rather than the institutional perceptive.
• Customer Focused People: Staff who are caring, competent, informed, motivated,
respectful, attentive and welcoming.
• Customer Focused Promotion: Clear and accurate communication of benefits, costs,
conditions and procedures.
• Customer Focused Processes: Procedures that are as simple as possible, confidential and
reliable.
• Customer Focused Products: Products which are clearly focused on meeting customer
needs, solving their problems and enabling opportunities.
• Customer Focused Positioning: The organization commits itself to delivering a particular
type of value and consistently delivers what it has promised.
• Customer Focused Physical evidence: The environment is clean, well organized, attractive
and where possible, creative.
• Customer Focused Price: The cost of accessing the services is transparent and easy to
calculate.
• Customer Focused Place: Services are accessible through nearby locations and convenient
opening hours. The environment is secure and comfortable.
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9. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Creating and maintaining a quality customer service
Culture
The most important component of any customer service strategy is creating a quality
service culture. This culture goes beyond making sure staff smile when they greet
customers at the door. It requires a commitment to making customer contact
with the institution a completely positive and delightful experience, one that
every customer will want to repeat over and over again.
It means internalizing a set of values, attitudes and habits that promote quality
customer service. It involves systems and processes that facilitate the flow of
information to and from customers, and the implementation of decisions that
respond appropriately to customer needs.
Organizational culture
• The culture of the organization will significantly determine the level of customer
care in it. An organization’s culture consists of two parts:
• (a) External display of culture, the way it presents itself to customers and
others outside the organization; and
• (b) Internal display of culture, which reflects how core values shape the way
employees work together.
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10. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Creating and maintaining a quality customer service
• Most banks have very strict repayment schedules. Clients need to pay on or before the
repayment date or they will be considered delinquent and subjected to penalties or to debt
collectors. What should a loan officer do if an otherwise good client misses a repayment for
a week?
• A culture that promotes teamwork can have a positive effect on customer delight. When
employees work well together, they create a pleasant environment to work. Customers will
enjoy coming to the office more in this pleasant environment than if loan officers are
complaining about each other or about their boss. Customer service also benefits since a
teamwork approach means that customers will be attended to no matter whose client they
are. To achieve and maintain customer loyalty, the organizational culture should encourage
employees to do better tomorrow than they did today.
The quality management process
• A customer service culture can be adopted through the application of a quality
management process. The advantage with setting up such a process is that the bank or
organization can standardize and assure excellent customer service to every customer. This
way, outstanding customer experience does remain one-in-a-while happenings. They get
built into all service delivery processes.
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11. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Step 1: Define the required quality of the service being offered.
To excel, define top quality standard for each product.
Step 2: Establish procedures and service standards that reflect the level of quality required.
Service standards are measures against which you can judge the actual performance of
customer service. A bank should get a feel for what their customers want, feel is
important, and what influences their purchase decisions, and then define quality standards
for those areas for the different products.
Step 3: Monitor the production and provision of services against the standards.
Once the standards are in place and everyone in the institution knows about them,
performance should be measured and judged against those standards. The bank should
make sure that there are easy mechanisms to communicate complaints and suggestions
from staff and customers.
Step 4: If quality is below the standards, quickly take appropriate action.
Remedial actions could include a change in policy or incentives, additional market research, a
customer recovery campaign or staff training. Major adjustments or new initiatives may be
required, but small changes can often go a long way towards improving service quality. Of
course, if the quality of customer service is found to exceed its standard, action should be
taken: to reward the staff (and to help the others emulate).
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12. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
Building a customer service culture
In entrenching a culture of customer delight, encourage internal and external feedback.
Offer customers and staff a variety of channels for sharing their suggestions,
complaints and comments, and actively solicit their contributions. To encourage
feedback, information can be collected through;-
a. Offering periodic prizes for the best customer suggestion.
b. Setting up a customer service hotline
c. Dedicating a customer service/ complaints email address
d. Availing suggestion boxes
e. Having an open door policy among branch managers
f. Such a diversity of channels can be useful because each one gathers a different kind
of information from a different subset of customers. The information from clients
can then be aggregated or singly communicated frequently to all management and
staff. Additionally, the bank management and staff should;
• Be accountable to customers. A communication feedback loop must consolidate the
customer suggestions, analyze them, and channel the input into the decision
making process.
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13. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
• Internalize the institution’s policies and procedures and the answers to frequently
asked questions to facilitate consistency in the service delivered to customers.
• Include a reference to customer service and the search for quality in the bank’s
objectives or mission statement.
Many mission statements have little bearing on the daily transactions between
employees and customers. It should not be that way. The bank should, when
necessary, evaluate its existing mission statement by analyzing it under the following
questions;
1. Do you really think a customer cares about your mission statement as it currently is?
2. Can anyone in the bank recite the mission statement by heart?
3. Does anyone in the bank think about the mission statement when interacting with a
customer?
4. Does everyone in your bank work on the basis of the mission statement?
5. The mission statement by itself cannot accomplish anything. It needs to be
publicized and promoted. It needs to be used to motivate people, not just to do
well, but also to constantly improve service quality.
• Uphold standards. Make sure every staff understands that the bank is developing a
quality culture and is aware of the customer service standards. Standards are
important not only for staff who serves the customer, but also for support staff and
staff in the back office.
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14. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
• Commit the institution and its staff to long term relationships with customers. This
will help to create a rationale and an incentive for quality customer service because
long term relationships will be impossible without it.
• Encourage staff to be customer problem solvers. A bank should not see itself as a
business that provides financial services only but as a solver of customers’ problems
through financial services. If bank staff members see themselves as problem solvers,
they will go out of their way to ensure that the bank’s products are indeed achieving
that objective.
• Empower staff to do whatever is necessary to help an upset customer feel good about
his relationship with the bank. Allow them to exercise judgment and creativity in
responding to customer needs and problems.
• Recruit staffs who demonstrate a commitment to customer service.
• Make it every staff’s responsibility to step out of the office on a regular basis and talk
to customers, not just their customers, but also their competitors’ customers and
their former customers.
• Make it easy to voice a complaint. There are many reasons why dissatisfied customers
keep quiet: they think it will be too much hassle to complain; they do not know where
to complain; they do not know that sharing the information will change anything; or
there is simply no one to complain to.
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15. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
The challenges of delivering quality customer service
Sometimes despite our best efforts and sometimes because of inadequate effort, it is difficult
to deliver quality customer service because of the following reasons:
1. Inadequate internal mastery/ knowledge of the services and products
2. Poorly designed service delivery methods, for instance causing long queues in the banking
halls
3. Lack of a strongly shared ideal of excellent customer service
4. Past, costly mistakes in choosing the IT/ MIS; banks sometimes have their computer
systems going down and the resulting long delays frustrate customers
5. Clerical and procedural errors arising from low diligence and inadequately trained staff
holding responsible positions
6. Disjointed internal structures within the bank, under which clients are referred to several
departments that do not seem coordinated; in such cases, customers feel they are being
tossed around
7. Lack of respect to both the internal and external customers
8. Disruptive effect of internal management and reward systems. As an example, the bank
might be proclaiming customer delight as the key focus while the internal reward system
completely ignores staff who habitually go an extra mile to offer quality service which
retains the clients
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16. THE UGANDA INSTITUTE
OF BANKING &
FINANCIAL SERVICES
UIBFS
ISO 9001:2008 CERTIFIED
The cost of poor customer service
• Customer desertion or drop-out: A customer lost means loss of deposit, loss of potential
income from lending, loss of potential referrals and high cost of attracting a new customer.
A survey conducted by Micro save in Uganda showed that service product features, service
quality ( in particular service time and attitude) were a major reason for customers
choosing to leave Ugandan financial institutions
• High costs of attracting new customers: There is usually a cost associated with attracting
new clients marketing activities, direct calling/ prospecting, staff time spent meeting and
wooing prospects. In the financial sector, it is estimated that it costs up to five times to get
a new, viable borrowing customer than it does to lend to an existing customer.
• Lower income: Lower income results from several factors. These include fewer loans to
clients, reduced deposits and thus reduced cash holdings which the bank could trade in the
short term (interbank) money markets, and customers choosing to use competitors for the
money transfers/ remittances.
• Loss of institution’s image: An appropriate image is vital to a financial institution. A strong
image significantly reduces the cost of acquiring new clients and is likely to make clients
more forgiving when there are service delivery problems.
• Lower staff morale: Poor levels of customer service result in customer complaints handled
by frontline staff. Continuously defending a bank against customer complaints of poor
service saps energy and morale from staff. Unhappy customers mean unhappy staff and the
reverse is true.
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