Indian banks fail to realise customer needs, says study

In their scramble for customer acquisitions, retail banks in India have fared better than their Asian counterparts when it comes to identifying and profiling the customer, but they have miserably failed to understand customer needs.

This is the findings of a study commissioned by Siebel Systems Inc and IBM Corp on the lead management and sales effectiveness of the top 100 retail banks in the Asia pacific region and Japan.

The study was undertaken between October 2003 and February 2004. According to the study, 63 per cent of Indian banks have been successfull in capturing the customers' basic contact details for identification and follow-up purposes as compared to 45 per cent of banks in Asia Pacific and Japan.

However, this trend is pronounced only among Indian foreign banks of which 100 per cent successfully capture customer contact details compared with 25 per cent of domestic banks.

The survey evaluated the top 100 retail banks across India, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The India leg of the survey covered 10 national banks and four foreign banks.

According to the study, 87 per cent of Indian banks make no attempt to cross sell up-sell related banking products during the course of customer interaction.

While none of the domestic banks attempt to cross/up sell, Indian foreign banks score higher at 25 per cent.

Telephone is still the preferred medium to resolve basic queries with. Compared to a near 100 per cent resolution over telephone, e-mail lags behind with as much as 43 per cent of Indian banks surveyed never responding to e-mails.

Only one per cent of the banks proactively referenced the e-mail that the customer had sent a few days earlier, states the report.

This implies that 99 per cent of the banks identical telephone and e-mail enquiries were treated as two unrelated enquiries.

Thus retail banks are missing a high percentage of opportunities to capture incremental revenue by continuing to treat telephone and e-mail interactions as service enquiries.

This also indicates unintegrated channel systems and that banks are potentially duplicating the effort and cost required to resolve customer enquiries.

The exception was a bank in Malaysia that successfully made the link between the two related interactions and answered customers in this regard.