Delivering better customer experience has become a key priority for most European retail banks in recent years. As we examined in last year’s EY and Efma paper, there are direct links between customer experience and loyalty, advocacy and revenues
For established banks, the importance of customer experience measurement is only increasing with the entry of FinTechs and other newcomers to the banking market. These extremely dynamic players have strengths in technology, branding and emotional engagement that incumbent banks may struggle to compete with.
The development of multichannel capabilities is a common feature of many banks’ responses to these strategic challenges. But this approach carries a risk of excessive cost buildup, given that many customers do not need their bank to provide every service through every channel. There is also a strategic risk that banks that put an excessive focus on accessibility are choosing to compete on FinTechs’ own terms. Banks that are found wanting run the risk of finding themselves increasingly disintermediated from their customers, and reduced to the role of product suppliers.
In our view, banks need to play to their strengths by giving their customers tailored, professional financial guidance. That means improving customer experience by leveraging banks’ core capabilities in areas such as product expertise, human capital and customer insight.
This brings us back to banks’ need for dynamic, precise and cost-effective customer experience management. That is why EY has used its expertise to develop a new approach to customer experience management, specifically designed for today’s world of digitization and “big data.” Fine-tuned through collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo of Italy, we call this new methodology the Intelligent Customer Experience (ICE).
In the rest of this paper we introduce the concepts behind the ICE; examine the methodology in three detailed sections; and conclude by considering the scalability of the approach across the whole banking industry
