Banks Need to Fix Customer Support Before It's Too Late
Book: Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go But Something You Do Author: Brett King ISBN: 978-1-118-58963-2 Chapter 4: Onboard and Engaged - The Ecosystem for Customer Support
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If Chapter 3 was about why branches are dying, Chapter 4 is about what banks should be doing instead. And the short version is: banks are terrible at customer support and they need to fix that before anything else matters.
The Support Problem Is Real
King starts with a painful truth. In the old days, you had two options when you needed help from your bank. Walk into a branch or pick up the phone. That was it. Then email came along in the late 90s, and banks basically said “don’t email us, we won’t answer.” Some banks still do this today. They literally tell you not to reply to their emails.
Think about that. A customer reaches out for help and the bank’s response is “please don’t contact us this way.” That is not a support strategy. That is actively pushing people away.
King quotes Gary Vaynerchuk here: “I genuinely believe that any business can create a competitive advantage through giving outstanding customer care.” And he is right. But banks have done the opposite. They have built organizations that minimize service to cut costs.
Twitter Changed the Game (Sort Of)
One of the more interesting parts of this chapter is King’s breakdown of how Twitter became a customer support channel. Starting around 2009, banks started using Twitter to respond to customer complaints. But they did it badly.
The problems were obvious. Twitter is 24/7, but banks had their Twitter accounts signing off at 5pm saying “we’ll be back in the morning.” They put untrained college graduates in charge of responding to angry customers. And when someone actually asked for help on Twitter, the standard response was “Twitter isn’t secure, please call our call center.”
But if the customer wanted to call the call center, they would have already called. They chose Twitter because it was faster and more convenient. Sending them back to the phone is fighting against what the customer actually wants.
King lays out four reasons Twitter works for support. It is real-time and fast. It can be personal (ASB Bank in New Zealand did a great job of this by personalizing their Twitter account with team member names). Direct messages handle sensitive issues privately. And here is the clever one: answering banking questions from people who are not even your customers yet is a sneaky good way to win new business.
The Silo Problem
King tells a story from his own life that perfectly captures what is wrong with bank support. He walked into a Westpac branch to discharge a mortgage and move the surplus cash to a new account. The loans officer could not even look up his mortgage balance. She had to call the mortgage center hotline while he sat there watching. He could have made that call from home.
The branch did not solve his problem. It just added a middleman. And this happens because banks are organized in silos. The branch team cannot see what the mortgage team sees. The credit card team cannot talk to the savings team. Each department has its own systems, its own processes, its own little kingdom.
Another example: a bank in the Middle East was getting 30 to 60 requests per day from customers asking for their credit card balance at the branch. The tellers had to call the customer service hotline to get the number. The customers could have done that themselves. The branch was literally just a person making a phone call for you.
And then there is my favorite story. King accidentally transferred money to his credit card instead of his savings account. He called the bank to fix it. They told him he could transfer money onto his credit card but not off it. The only way to fix the mistake? Write a physical letter to the bank. In the 2010s. A letter.
Stop Forcing Customers Into Your Channels
King makes a comparison to the travel industry that really lands. Between 2004 and 2011, there was a 79 percent drop in people booking ski holidays through travel agents. By 2011, only six percent of ski holiday bookings happened on the high street. Why? Online was faster. Travel agents were generalists who did not know much about skiing specifically. There was no cost advantage to going in person. And online resources were simply better at providing information.
Sound familiar? That is exactly what is happening with banking. Customers can research products better online than most branch advisors can explain them. There is no speed advantage to visiting a branch. And yet banks keep trying to funnel everyone through that one channel.
King puts it bluntly. If a customer goes to your website ready to apply for a credit card, and you tell them to print a form and fax it or visit a branch, you have lost that customer. No banking product is so unique that people will jump through hoops to get it. There are ten other banks offering the same thing with fewer steps.
The Org Chart Needs to Change
This is where King gets into the structural stuff. And it is important even if it is less exciting.
Most banks are organized around products and branches. The branch is king. Internet banking and mobile are called “alternative channels” and get tiny budgets. King compares this to having a nerdy cousin that nobody takes seriously at family events, and then one day that cousin sells a startup for $300 million and everyone is confused.
The fix, according to King, is moving from a branch-led organization to a customer-led one. Instead of measuring success by branch revenue, measure it by customer profitability across all channels. Instead of having separate teams for the call center, internet banking, mobile, and ATM, create one customer channel management team.
He also introduces the concept of “service-selling.” Instead of pushing the product of the month on everyone who walks through the door, use data and analytics to figure out what each customer actually needs. Then present the right offer at the right time through the right channel. If done well, it feels like good service, not a sales pitch.
The personal loan example King gives is solid. Instead of one generic campaign, create different “wrappers” for different channels. The core product stays the same, but how you present it changes based on whether the customer is on the website, mobile app, ATM, or in a branch. Pre-approved offers show up in internet banking. Personalized messages come through SMS. Facebook integration helps with onboarding. Each channel gets content designed for how people actually use that channel.
My Take
This chapter is a reality check. Banks have spent decades building support systems that work for the bank, not the customer. Every time a new way to communicate appeared (email, social media, chat, video), banks resisted it. They kept trying to push everyone back to the branch or the call center because that is what their systems were built for.
The silo problem is the root cause of most bad banking experiences I have had. Every time I have been bounced between departments, told to call a different number, or asked to provide the same information I already gave someone else, it is because the bank’s internal walls are more important than my time.
What I appreciate about King’s approach in this chapter is that he does not just complain. He lays out a specific organizational restructure. Branch management becomes channel and partner management. Marketing splits into brand marketing, advocacy marketing, and customer dynamics. IT gets reorganized around content deployment and customer intelligence. It is a big ask, but it makes sense.
The travel industry comparison is the strongest argument in the whole chapter. Travel agents disappeared because they added friction and provided less value than doing it yourself online. Bank branches are on the same path. The only question is how fast.
Reading this in hindsight, King was ahead of the curve but also optimistic about how quickly banks would adapt. Most banks in 2019 still had the same organizational problems he described. Some still do. The ones that figured it out (like the neobanks that came later) built their entire model around the customer, not the channel. And they did not need a single branch to do it.
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