Disclaimer: I work in a bank and have worked closely with the customer support team.
Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and customer support is expensive.
If you are someone who routinely calls your bank then your long-term value (LTV) is going to take a huge hit, so, of course banks want to keep everything as "low-touch" as possible.
A small anecdote: there were plenty of elderly people who were calling customer support every day to ask for their balance, because they did not trust the digital app. At some point, their calls started being routed to some chat-bot.
Customer support is also "embarrassingly outsource-able". The first layer of contact is usually done by someone who does not, in fact, work for "The Bank". They are actually employed by some huge contact center company who happens to have access to the bank's Salesforce CRM, and are instructed on how to solve most of complaints. It's only when they are faced with a very specific issue, that the ticket is then escalated to the in-bank operations team.
IIRC, we actually divide tickets in four categories: "L1, L2, L3 and L4". L1 and L2 are done by outsourced teams, L3 is usually the bank's operations squad, and L4 is the tech team with read-access to the database.
While I appreciate this argument, I feel it's disingenuous.
The reason is that this problem doesn't just apply to banks, it applies to every goddamn service I try to make contact with these days.
The systems are setup to waste a users time so only by showing a large commitment of time and emotional frustration can you get to talk to a human.
The net result is massive waste of everyone's time. It's a race to the bottom situation, and it's a societal problem, companies do it to compete.
But if your competition didn't do this hostile user gaslighting, then you wouldn't either. Or if instead of wasting 30 minutes average time before talking to someone with agency, the time was reduced to 5, or even 10 minutes.
I think the answer is regulation, that the mean or median average for time to speak to a live human should be no more than x (I propose 10 minutes), combined with an ombusdman to report companies that hide behind automated systems instead of do support, and if the average response time goes over allowed limit, or more than y percent of users report a company for not having a way to address their actual problem, then that company should pay a financial penalty, to it's users pro-rata. If the penalty is balanced, this way companies would actually share the cost of the people's time they are wasting.
One problem I've observed first hand is that the head of customer service is measured on (among other things) the amount of money being spent on customer service (and other closely-related metrics like average contacts per order, agent time spent per customer, etc.). These executives have no direct control over the product, so they can't actually solve the problems that are causing people to contact customer service. For example, they aren't in charge of the warehouses, so if for example a ton of people are calling in because they are getting the wrong item in the orders, the CS leader is getting dinged in their metrics but can't address the root cause.
This leads them to do things like those being discussed, where they take measures to reduce contacts without solving any real problems. Maybe if "customer satisfaction" were a more important metric than "CS budget," this would be better, but customer satisfaction is very hard to actually measure (how many of us even bother filling out surveys, and of those who do, how many are honest?).
I guess a lot of this boils down to "big company syndrome" where the customer experience is controlled by a series of interlocking factors, but the humans who control those factors are siloed and disincentivized to work together to improve things. My experience is that in most of these situations, people actually do have good intentions overall. You wouldn't believe the ways I've heard CS executives twist themselves into knots to convince people that outsourced or automated customer service is actually better for the customer (and I think they truly did believe it, or at least had fooled themselves into believing it). But the end result is bad for everyone.
Which is why we need regulation tied to actual financial performance of the business.
So that when they try to externalize the costs they end up paying for it instead, enough to influence the business to change, to fix the root cause of the problem.
> Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and customer support is expensive.
Is this because banks don't need retail money any more, since instead of acting as intermediaries between savers and borrowers, they now act as intermediaries between the Federal Reserve and borrowers, and only take savings because they're required to by law?
Banking has shifted from low-volume high-profit (read: A bunch of rich people) to high-volume low-profit (read: normal folk and some poor people).
The reason why margin is low... is because you are the customer. I know many people feel "poor people are unbanked" and the industry is going in the direction to support them, but it also means banks have to find ways to get money from poor people and reduce costs everywhere possible.
> Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and customer support is expensive. If you are someone who routinely calls your bank then your long-term value (LTV) is going to take a huge hit, so, of course banks want to keep everything as "low-touch" as possible.
Here’s the thing: this statement un-ironically embodies everything wrong behind the article.
1. “If you” — where you are the provider of capital the bank makes money from, or interest payments the bank makes money from, or fees the bank makes money from, i.e., the source of the bank’s revenue
2. “are someone” — victim blaming
3. “who routinely calls” — aka, who experiences so much friction in trying to accomplish routine banking tasks, they are willing to endure the abuse of the bank’s “customer support”; aka, who is willing to be the canary in the coal mine about abjectly terrible process; aka, the gift of customer feedback with willingness to get to the bottom of the issue, such as, why does this issue exist, and/or, why does this issue cause a call, and what can be done to ensure the next time the customer either (a) doesn’t experience it, or (b) can resolve it themselves in an obvious way less painful than calling in.
3. “then your LTV is going to take a huge hit” — no, your (the customer’s) LTV didn’t change, the bank is unable to service you effectively. Your value for revenue generation is the same. The bank’s inability to service you lowers their RoE, or return on equity.
And …
> thrawaybanksup (18 hrs ago) - Disclaimer: I work in a bank and have worked closely with the customer support team.
4. Not throwaway bank CTO, not disclaiming but disclosing: I spent ~5 yrs as CTO for Americas at the 2nd largest bank in the free world, trying to help it grasp what I’m sharing here. Worked closely with not just the customer support team, but all teams. From what I observed, I’d suggest your post exemplifies almost the entire banking industry’s fundamental misunderstanding of how to enable customer success in ways that drive bank success.
So here’s the actual thing:
In general, “support” is called for in the face of in-ability, and it’s the bank that is failing to provide that ability, even in the case of a senior checking their balance.
(ASIDE: You say “works closely with” the support team. Could be you’re with tech, could be product, could be a number of groups — regardless, the framing is that of customer service as cost center. So this post is addressing the customer service team or role. Moving on…)
Reframe everything you wrote imagining, for a moment, that customer success was a legitimate goal, and you may be able to hear how tone deaf support-as-cost-center is:
5. “Customer support is embarrassingly outsourceable” — Rephrase as “customer success is embarrassingly outsourceable” … Suddenly that doesn’t sound right, does it?
That sounds like someone somewhere isn’t doing a job.
For instance, since winning product management involves customer journey, customer experience, and reducing friction, why is “customer support” considered a cost center ripe for cost avoidance, and not signal priority one for product development?
L1, L2, L3, L4 — no product team in there anywhere, as if the errors are a technology team issue rather than a product usability fail!
Ouch.
Banking is still run by a vast “frozen middle” of management whose jobs depend on a flat refusal to accept any of the above.
In the rare example such as the bank called “Simple” which initially got it better, the few who figured that out will get gobbled up by a bigger bank that doesn’t get it seeking growth or returns or technology, folded into the larger bank’s operations, thereby destroying the difference never recognized — actually rejected — by a majority of the acquirer’s middle or even senior management team.
Sorry, @thrawaybanksup, you cannot outsource customer success. It’s a way of thinking, not middle or back office, or operations, or support. The bank in the customer’s experience, in the customer’s head, is the reality. It’s the bank that succeeds or fails.
Fight to elevate the support team’s role to help “solve the problem at the left”, a tight feedback loop prioritizing work where the product decisions are made, so terrible customer experience doesn’t get shoveled out back to bury a disempowered call agent, it lands on those responsible for the experience.
Help “Management” grasp the surprisingly effective concept that “support” redefined as “success” both improves margins and reduces support expense when driving simplifying the experience.
2. (again) “If you are someone who routinely calls your bank…” — No. Just no. Instead: If you are a bank which gets routinely called! …
Here's the thing: retail banking margin is actually quite low and customer support is expensive.
If you are someone who routinely calls your bank then your long-term value (LTV) is going to take a huge hit, so, of course banks want to keep everything as "low-touch" as possible.
A small anecdote: there were plenty of elderly people who were calling customer support every day to ask for their balance, because they did not trust the digital app. At some point, their calls started being routed to some chat-bot.
Customer support is also "embarrassingly outsource-able". The first layer of contact is usually done by someone who does not, in fact, work for "The Bank". They are actually employed by some huge contact center company who happens to have access to the bank's Salesforce CRM, and are instructed on how to solve most of complaints. It's only when they are faced with a very specific issue, that the ticket is then escalated to the in-bank operations team.
IIRC, we actually divide tickets in four categories: "L1, L2, L3 and L4". L1 and L2 are done by outsourced teams, L3 is usually the bank's operations squad, and L4 is the tech team with read-access to the database.