Case Study - Banking
The success of financial institutions like banks completely depends on the performance of their employees. An enormous majority of banking firms which are now in a state to differentiate their customer service from their competitors. Whenever all products are similar, quality of service makes the difference between one and another. Banking institutions hire mystery shopping (MSI) to estimate customer service. This encourages customer satisfaction and boosts productivity.
Banking mystery shoppers play a vital role to know about the quality of customer service and to make out the areas that requires enhancement. To be more specific, banking mystery shoppers evaluates the administrative functions, cross selling skills, problem solving, compliance, ethics and interpersonal skills of bank employees. They estimate sales efficiency of platform and teller staff by examining whether the bank staff listens to its customers, how friendly tellers are, how much time the customers seek to get to a teller and much more. Furthermore, they try to estimate how much the bank personnel are familiar with the bank's products and services.
Banking mystery shoppers make use of different mystery shopping methods like face-to-face, telephone, internet and video assessments. With face-to-face shopping method, banking mystery shoppers can estimate the sales and service levels of bank employees. Mystery shopping via telephone calls provides assistance to the shoppers to identify whether the staff holds a decent communication with customers.
After estimating the customer service and performance of bank employees, a report is submitted to the branch manager. This is used to evaluate the changes in performance over time. Reports given by banking mystery shoppers comprise a comparison of branches within a bank and banks in a region. Also they offer advices for branch manager on training and performance alteration.
Case#1: Banking industry uses mystery shoppers to gauge employee's ability to Cross Sell, Make Referrals and Close Sales
Situation:
A large national bank has 35 branches, have two main goals this year:
- Goal#1: The bank wants to find a mystery shopping provider whose shoppers "blended in" with real customers.
- Goal#2: The bank wants to gauge employees' ability to offer top-quality service.
In order to fulfill these two goals, the bank's senior VP of marketing hunted for a new mystery shopping provider. After a series of searching, the bank decided to hire a small local company.
"This MS provider is small enough that we feel like we will get attention we needed, and they really willing to customize their mystery shopping program to fit our bank's specific needs and promise to rotate new shoppers through the bank's branches from month to month." Said the senior VP.
"The bank uses mystery shopping reports to a huge extent for employee evaluations," she adds, so it is important that the program evaluate the exact skills that the bank's leadership felt is important. These skills included the ability to be hospitable toward customers, convey accurate information about bank's financial products, and make efficient transactions. The bank also wanted to gauge its employees' ability to cross-sell certain financial products.
Methodology:
After a serial of meeting with Mystery Shopping, the bank decided to perform a baseline evaluation of its customer service levels. In order to keep employees involved in the program, the bank offers award such as "holiday" vouchers, and Apple iphone to those who earn scores of 100% on a shop and also bonus points.
The Bank has 35 branches and conducted a varying number of shops each month, but averages two to three in branch shops for each of three areas - free checking, commercial accounts and mortgages and one telephone shop per branch each year.
Mystery Shopper's finding:
From this mystery shopping evaluation, the bank learnt that its employees did not consistently use customers' names, a practice that bank leadership felt was important in order to provide top-notch customer service.
Solution: To address this issue, the bank instituted training that helped employees identify ways that they could learn and remember customers' names-through a friendly introductory greeting or by glancing at the customer's check
The employees did not ask for sale on cross selling products.
Solution: Employee were taught in a training workshop how to cross-sell appropriate Products by exploring customer's needs through simple questioning asking and how to Close sale without feeling too pushy.
Case#2: Banking industry uses mystery shoppers to review their compliance with the requirements of the Code of Banking Practice in relation to the accessibility of complaint information to bank staff and bank customers
Situation:
If bank staff is lack of sound of understanding of the complaints process, and if printed information it is not readily accessible to them and bank customers, there is a real risk of customer dissatisfaction, ranging from mild discomfort to an entrenched and enduring sense of grievance, with adverse implications for a bank's reputation for customer service. Therefore, the senior VP of the national bank conducted mystery shopping program with the main 2 goals:
- Goal#1: The bank wants to test how well the banks internal complaints procedures is known to bank staff confronted with a problem or a potential complaint.
- Goal#2: The bank wants to measure the degree of friendliness and helpfulness of bank staffs while performing their job and identify which branch needs improvement.
Methodology:
The survey covered 195 branches. We targeted bank branches at peak hours in a peak period. We appreciate that even most highly trained and capable bank staff member can, if confronted with a lengthy and rapidly lengthening queue of lunchtime customers, feel overwhelmed by the need to devote time, care and energy to an unusual complaint, knowing full well that waiting queue is growing length with every passing moment.
In the interest of brevity, we have included a small proportion in the report of all mystery shopper responses - a balanced sample representative of responses as a whole.
Mystery Shopper's finding:
From check of the location of branches surveyed revealed that most were in or near the main streets of inner city or town areas, with small or outlying branches also being somewhat underrepresented.
All frontline bank staff should at the very least know that their bank has a customer complaints process and that information about it is required to be available in printed form. Mystery shopper's evaluation found, "Too many staff in the branches surveyed has still not reached this basic level of knowledge." This finding, coupled with the absence of bank's own information leaflets from the display stands of 31% of branches. Among the 69% of branches that has bank's internal complaints procedures printed information, 35% of branches was easily and quickly found within one minute. In a further 24% of branches 1 - 3 minutes were required to locate such information, while 6% of branches required 3-5 minutes, with the final 3% requiring > than 5 minutes.
It means that we cannot yet affirm that bank branches are generally fulfilling their obligation under the Code to provide complaints procedures those are accessible to all their customers, and to provide for a timely resolution of complaints in a fair and reasonable manner.
In the test of bank staff willingness to help, it was heartening to note that, with the scale of 10, 18.8% of branches involved scored 10 (the highest score), while 2.2% scored 1 (the lowest score). The average scale for all banks is 7.5 out of 10. Our statistics, backed up by detailed accounts of staff behavior compiled by our mystery shoppers, shows also the details of which branches need improvement and branches need to maintain their best performance.
