Located this article from Celent, at Aqubanc and the first thing that strikes you is the lack of differentiation in strategy amongst banks.

In North American Bank Priorities: Convention or Innovation, Celent examines & analyzes — through the eyes of bank CIO’s — bank IT & business priorities.    ….

Finally, the report focuses on the area banks consider core to their entire operation — customer-centricity. ‘In order for banks to succeed, they must learn to innovate while working within regulatory & budgetary constraints,’ says Jacob Jegher, Celent.

Source:  Aqubanc

Customer centric has got to be the most overused, misunderstood, and least well implemented strategy amongst banks.  Its got to be right up there with Governments preaching productivity.

Anyhow, Celent goes on to report the top (amongst several) customer centric initiatives for Banks are:

1. customer profiling
2. customer service
3. improve cross selling

This is an interesting mix of activities (1), and objectives (2 & 3).  But its not clear how they support client centricity?

Lets go back to this review of Forresters review of customer centricity:

customer familiarity

1. field research
2. design persona

organisational engagement

1. Since internal alignment remains a critical challenge to improving customer experience, firms can’t just rely on the nebulous notion of “executive buy-in.”
2. To create the change necessary across the company, firms need to engage in company wide efforts that demonstrate a clear commitment to serving customer needs.

….. alongside the experience design process …….

describe interaction personality

1. address the chasm that exists between marketing messages created in corporate marketing and the interactive experiences delivered by the rest of the organization — in the retail branches, on the phone, or on the Web

identify high impact moments

1. companies need to identify which ones have the largest impact on users.
2. There’s no magic step in identifying these “moments of truth” — firms need to uncover what’s really important to their target customers

enable experience

1. craft interactions that will resonate positively with key customers by focusing on the right things

measure & refine

1. portfolio of measurement tools and approaches for tracking what customers do, what they experience, who they are, and what they think

Aside from whether these are the right elements, or complete or not, the characteristic displayed is all about customer experience.  Lets remind ourselves of the the Banks top three initiatives in support of customer centricity:

1. customer profiling (activity)
2. customer service (objective with some activities, such as training)
3. improve cross selling (objective)

Nowhere in these three elements is there a strategy to change the customer experience.  #1, and # 3 certainly do not.  #1 at best is an enabler, and #3 would be at best an outcome.  #2, customer service, is close, but just too broad.  It will result in activities like, training, more tellers, longer hours, take a number systems in branches, etc.

I like (can’t you tell) the Forrester model, because it re-engineers our thinking towards things that will change the customers beliefs about our Bank.  There is no mention of product here (read # 3 which Banks give to the Product group). 

Client centricity is all about re-engineering Bank processes, channels, and to a lesser extent products, to improve the customer experience.  This is an important distinction, because there are millions of customer experiences each day and they all count towards customer experience satisfaction.