News: Customer Service/Care
Customer service training needed as banks score poorly
07 February 2008
UK banks and building societies have had their online customer service called into question by a new report of 52 leading European financial services companies, commissioned by IBM and Kana Software.
The study revealed that over half of financial institutions in Britain were unable to correctly answer simple enquiries made through online channels, either providing an incorrect answer or failing to answer at all.
Furthermore, the survey into the quality of online customer care also revealed that a third of companies did not provide a contact email address on their website, while a fifth failed to respond to an email enquiry.
Eddie Keal, financial services team leader at IBM, noted: "Firms that enable customers to easily answer their own questions online using searchable FAQs and convenient web 2.0 capabilities, such as social networking software and life chat, can increase customer satisfaction and cross-selling opportunities."
While nearly all UK companies had websites with multiple contact telephone numbers, very few provided new communication methods such as web-forms or web-chat.
It was also revealed that only 29 per cent of banks provided an encrypted communications channel for customer service.
