Benchmarks for Excellence In Caribbean Retail Financial Services

Content

• Executive Overview
• Project Background
• Study Methodology & Benchmark Class
• Report Structure and Organization
• Key Findings and Insights
  • Sales and Marketing: Focus marketing efforts on customer relationships and leverage all staff to execute marketing strategies to capture not only new customers but also increase the depth of assets within existing accounts
  • Customer Service Excellence: Design all processes, both front and back office, to improve the overall customer experience and customer service levels
  • Human Resources: Design innovative ways to manage people, provide incentives to ensure behaviors are aligned with strategies, and create HR processes that measure and align capabilities with intended performance standards
  • Back Office Processing: Utilize technology and shared services to streamline back office processes, improve speed and accuracy and further enhance the overall customer experience
• Path Forward
  • Introduction
  • Marketing and Sales Excellence
• Overview
• Adopt A Marketing and Sales Strategy Which Focus on Customers, Not Products
  • Leverage a depth-based marketing approach, focusing on relationships not products, to increase sales to existing customers
  • Focus on the entire customer lifecycle, e.g., cradle to grave, and customize the product line to the lifecycle to maximize product revenue and customer retention
  • Build relationships around your most significant products to raise customer-switching costs and make it easier to cross sell to them to increase wallet-share
  • Utilize formalized account management processes to build lasting relationships and identify customer needs
  • Clearly define market positioning both internally and externally to ensure consistent communication with the market and in-branch customers
  • Employ marketing campaigns that are both defensive and offensive in nature to retain existing customers and acquire new ones
• Utilize All Staff to Deliver Personal Sales Opportunities
  • Train tellers and other frontline staff to identify sales opportunities with existing customers and make referrals to sales
  • Foster customer intimacy through personalized marketing campaigns to existing customers
  • Leverage mobile sales force to increase loan revenue, build long-term relationships, and improve customer satisfaction
  • Take a "clicks not bricks" approach and use online banking and ATMs instead of additional infrastructure investments to grow revenues and assets
  • Service Excellence
• Overview
• Design Customer Service Processes around Customer Delight
  • Create an intentional and consistent customer experience as part of your branding strategy to retain more customers
  • Use specific language among the staff to reinforce the intended brand and convey a positive customer experience with the company's mission in mind
  • Provide a personalized service to create a memorable experience
  • Assign an employee or several employees who can assist customers as they wait, encourage them to use the ATM, or otherwise expedite their service
  • Organize your teller lines by types of services and level of customers to get people to the appropriate staff person more quickly and enhance the overall customer experience
  • Redirect customer calls from the local branches to a central call center to speed up the in-person transaction response times in local branches
• Develop Customer-Oriented Employees
  • Incorporate regular team meetings among the branch office staff to reinforce desired attitudes and motivate the team to deliver excellent service
  • Instill a customer service orientation among operational and functional staff to speed up customer transactions
• Design Customer Service Measures to Ensure Alignment with Customer Excellence Goals
  • Develop service standards and disseminate them widely to reinforce employee performance expectations
  • Employ frequent customer satisfaction surveys, including surveying satisfaction with the competition, to ensure customer trends are identified quickly and potential opportunities are revealed47
• Customer and Technology Practices
  • Motivate customers to use alternative electronic transactions rather than teller transactions
  • Encourage customers to use technology at the point of transaction to improve adoption rates
  • Human Resources and Management Excellence
• Overview
• Staffing and Development Practices
  • Leverage both technical and behavioral competencies in order to hire the right people
  • Employ job rotation programs to allow staff to experience different roles and a means to keep them engaged and retained
  • Leverage alternate career paths to reduce costs and maximize employee contributions
• Performance Management Practices
  • Link compensation to individual performance to motivate higher performance
  • Tie employee and customer satisfaction directly to manager performance management processes, as part of a balanced scorecard approach
  • Require responsible staff members to develop an action plan based on identified improvement areas to ensure that measures are used for continuous improvements
  • Engage employees in regular goal setting for themselves with follow-up coaching sessions to keep employees motivated
  • Employ motivational approaches with customer-facing employees to inspire world-class customer service
• Training
  • Leverage Computer-Based Training to improve training effectiveness and reduce training costs
  • Use shared services and outsourced training models to improve the cost effectiveness of training
  • Transactional Excellence
• Overview
• Back Office Processing
  • Use an integrated, shared services approach and move transactional activities out of the branches to boost productivity and increase the focus of the branches on the customer
  • Use concurrent work processing (e.g., workflows) to create technology that will reduce paperwork, shrink timeframes and increase customer satisfaction
  • Use OCR and imaging to improve check-processing speed and enhance overall customer service
• Loan Processing
  • Exploit the loan process to cross sell to customers who have products at other branches and to learn how to better address their needs
  • Use telephone-based screening and pre-qualifying for loan applications and make loan applications appointment-based to reduce customer wait time and decrease loan processing time
  • Create an expedited application process for existing loan customers to shorten application cycle time
  • Hold loan officers accountable for the on-time payment of their borrowers within the first few months of