In my role, I am often asked what the key to customer service excellence is. My answer will acknowledge that although there are contextual points depending on the organisation and industry, there are a number of clear and common themes. These include measuring the right things, building the customer experience from the customer's point of view, and driving insight (not just research!). Other important factors are more engaged employees who genuinely connect and believe in your purpose, and the right combination of humans and technology. Ultimately though great service organisations have two key things in common - a service-led culture and focused leadership which is clear about its purpose, and the relevance and the impact the organisation makes. 

In financial services, data and trust are at the heart of delivering effective, personal services in a way that is commercially beneficial to your business. If I don't trust an organisation, I will not share my data and trust is constantly eroded if I don't receive consistently high levels of service.

Better insight

Our UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) is published twice a year and tracks consumer experiences of around 250 brands. It can be downloaded free of charge here. Customer satisfaction with banks and building societies has fallen for the first time since January 2016 but is 2.6 points higher than the UK all-sector average.

The sector's average customer satisfaction score of 79.7 - a drop of  0.7 points in the past six months. As a result, the sector has dropped from the third to the fifth highest rated of the 13 sectors in the UKCSI.

As a membership organisation, we exist to help businesses improve their financial performance through better customer service.

Our research has identified the factors which have the greatest impact on customer satisfaction. Based on this, we benchmark organisations across five distinct dimensions: the customer experience, complaint handling, customer ethos, emotional connection and ethics (see diagram below). This helps identify areas of strength, as well as the areas  to address for the greatest return.

More engaged employees

Our research also tells us that for every one per cent increase in employee engagement we get a further 0.41 per cent increase in customer satisfaction. This may not come as a surprise, but what I am concerned about ?and is a surprise ?is the fact that so many companies fail to adequately develop their people through appropriate training and development. The number one area that drives engagement is employees seeing that their organisation genuinely cares about the customer experience. So please ask yourselves, do you have the balance right? And are we adequately developing our people for the challenging customer environment we are now working in?

Appropriate use of technology

As all financial services firms look to make better use of data (and open banking) and AI, it is important to understand customer attitudes and the importance of context.

Our Heart of AI research, suggests that consumers want to see technology for straightforward and transactional queries and prefer human interaction for more complex issues.

Customer app usage amongst banks and building societies is the highest of any sector, and tends to generate relatively high levels of customer satisfaction. According to our UKCSI sector report, 9.9 per cent of customers? interactions with a bank or building society were through an app. 63.5 per cent of those were simple tasks such as checking account information. And despite the growth in app usage, in-person and website still make up 70.6 per cent of all customer experiences in the sector. However, customer satisfaction through each of these channels fell year-on-year, reinforcing the need to deliver a consistent customer experience across all channels.

As we go forward it is absolutely clear that those organisations that truly focus on delivering an end to end customer experience that the boardroom obsesses about, and genuinely sees as a key strategic driver, will be the ones that outperform in the longer term. For those that fail to do this, the outlook is far from as sunny.