ABA Banking Journal - August 2008 - (Page 45) of commodity fare. Leaders in the field—Wells Fargo and Wachovia come to mind—have gradually reworked operations to better enable awareness of the customer’s perspective, in part, admittedly to make their cross-sales campaigns work. Yet, both have pushed to improve service issues via better channel integration, and generally, more consistent customer experiences across the channels. In short, these and other leaders have tried to “be all they can be” for consumers, but loyalty isn’t easy to come by. And perhaps this is why there is more attention being paid to measuring non-financial feedback from customers: those who manage to get it right—the process and the loyalty—will have something. “Measuring factors like loyalty, customer engagement, and customer satisfaction is becoming a popular idea,” says John McHugh, a New York-based managing partner, Financial Services CRM practice with Accenture. “You’re beginning to see more dashboards being developed to, in effect, link customer service insights to other measures,” he says. Banks, he explains have long known that happy customers are important to success, but only now is the industry in the first wave of formalizing how this intuitive truth translates into harder measures of success. The space is still emerging, with multi-application “enterprise marketing vendors” such as Aprimo, Oracle, and Unica offering applications within their suites, and niche players such as CustomerSat, MountainView, Calif., People Metrics in Philadelphia, and Satmetrix, Foster City, Calif., offering score development. IBM, in recent years, has been working with a concept similar to NPS it calls a Customer Advocacy Framework, which helps bank customers refine behaviorbased segments and steer strategy based on customer feedback. Gallup Consulting, with its HumanSigma methodology, is also seeking to render systematic the ways in which companies measure both employee performance and customer response to a given strategy. In Brief Payment engine offers single view of customer activity S Survey says… Accenture recently released research based on work it did with Satmetrix, which bills itself as “the Net Promoter Company.” The two companies did an internet-based query of 3,500 customers representing 16 banks. Accenture looked at loyalty and value creation measures such as: 1. a willingness to continue doing business with the bank; 2. likelihood of recommending bank; 3. likelihood of choosing to do business again with the bank, as well as 4. plan to purchase additional services; and 5. overall bank satisfaction. Out of these, Accenture found that net promoter most strongly correlated with loyalty. And yet, among the group surveyed, only half indicated that they would recommend terling Commerce recently announced a payment solution that integrates multiple, siloed payment channels into a single hub—connecting ACH activity, for instance with EDI. The objective? To offer one look into a given corporate customer’s payment stream for reporting, alerting and exception management purposes. Called Sterling Total Payments, the solution allows a bank to simplify operations and embrace something that consultants have referred to as a unified payments approach to execution and management. “Banks want to offer unified payments and be in the position to rationalize the payments they make on behalf of corporate clients, but it can be difficult to provide those services with a series of separate payment engines scattered throughout their footprint,” says Jim Cahagan, global industry executive for Financial Services. “Banks are under pressure to improve the contribution of payment-related services but face reduced margins and complex client requirements,” says Susan Feinberg, research director for wholesale banking at Tower Group. But rip and replace isn’t typically an option for banks trying to create efficiencies. Sterling’s system can integrate with ACH, EDI, Wire, SWIFT, check, and card payments systems. It can also take data flowing from direct demand accounts and customer information files. The user interface lets bank managers and corporate managers check the status of account activity, send and receive notifications, and generate reports, according to Cahagan. Exceptions can be managed from the same interface and data from underlying payment systems, which is flowed to the Total Payment’s hub can then be forwarded to bulk files for enterprise resource planning systems, internet cash management systems, branch systems, call centers, and to the e-mail channel. The solution, which supports domestic and international payments, supports improved analysis of payment activity and compliance by automating enforcement of bank policies and regulations that apply to all payment channels. Banks can look at activity and determine new payment service opportunities. Enhanced visibility into payment streams can also support customer self-service. ABA BANKING JOURNAL/AUGUST 2008 45 http://www.sterlingcommerce.com http://www.aprimo.com http://www.oracle.com http://www.unica.com http://www.customersat.com http://www.ci.mtnview.ca.us/ http://www.people-metrics.com http://www.satmetrix.com http://www.ibm.com http://www.gallup.com http://www.accenture.com
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