Improving Customer Service In The Banking Industry: A Case Study Analysis

Case Study Analysis

Through the increasing challenges and competitiveness in the market, one of the main continuous changes that has affected barely all industries is the increase in quality demand. With this in mind, there is no enterprise or any organization in the world which can manage to survive without effective customer satisfaction approaches. majorly, customer satisfaction can be characterized as the service quality offered by the service personnel with a comparison to the expectation which customer had in mind before the event (Lau, Cheung, Lam, and Chu, 2013). Customer satisfaction has been described by economists and/or market analysis as one of the most effective tools used by organizations in maintaining and attaining strong competitive advantages. This mainly is utilized to identify some of the basic weaknesses of the company and how to improve the performance level. The report will therefore reflect on poor customer service which has continued to impact the banking system in Australia which I also believe has significantly impacted the recent poor performance of banks (Lovelock and Patterson, 2015).

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In the recent events, there has been a lot of complaints in the banking management system in Australia which has been also portrayed through a series of probe issues. The main event occurred in my bank where I can describe the services offered as one of the poorest services which I have ever had. On the day of the event, I went to the bank to make some withdrawal and to also rectify some issues on my card. Arriving at the bank I found only two tellers who served the entire customer population and to make it worse the pace of the service was significantly slower. After a long queue, the teller who was supposed to help simply ignored me since the task at hand was not her role. Finally, when I met the person supposed to assist me, he argued that system was ‘down’ and urged me to leave him with my card which I did but on the day of pick-up it got misplaced and was never found. It is at this point where I noted there was no even recording of task which was conducted.

Despite the countless times of trying to report the incident, barely any reply came from the management and when I went back it all seemed like nothing ever happened. To make the situation worse, there was a number of customers who also had the same issue and who seemed to be even more furious than I was at the time. Due to the escalating event, the manager was finally able to intervene but still nothing seemed to change in the bank system expect the elimination of some of the minor issues. In order to be fully satisfied that all the transactions in the card were fully active, I had to go out of town to another branch which despite their assurance still the same feeling of the bank service was very disappointing. The same issues such as slow services and poor management were transferred from one branch to another thus showing the problem started from the senior management of the bank.

Root Causes of Poor Customer Service

According to the above case study, customer satisfaction of the bank (which identity will not be mentioned in this report) is considered very poor. The main root of this problem has been caused by the poor management and leadership in the banking system. This has continued to inflict the entire management system where an employee’s performance has also been affected. Through this, the engagement between the management, employees, and customers has been significantly affected leading to a high rate of customer dissatisfaction and poor employee performance. With the increased adaptation in technology, the bank seems to have poor adaptability to changes especially in the communication technology system. This has therefore discouraged effective communication between the management and the customers. In accordance to the report done on customer service analysis, 70% of the customer who have issues with technical issues normally don’t report cases (Talib and Rahman, 2010). It’s due to the unresponsive communication system in banks that have led to an increase of issues in banks in Australia which led customers to lose billions of money in the past year (Lovelock and Patterson, 2015).

In order to change the current poor service marketing in Australia banking system, the main areas that should be changed or paid attention include Improving and/or Re-Organization Structure and Strategies (delivery systems i.e. environment technology, products and services, and employee engagement improvement) and Creating Customer-Centric Systems (Talib, Rahman, and Qureshi, 2012).

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According to the case study analysis, one of the main issues in the bank system is the poor management and leadership. Through the continuous changes in globalization and industrialization, the banking sector can be described as one of the most diverse industry sectors with continuous increasing changes, especially in a technology environment (Sultan and Yin Wong, 2010). To achieve an effective management system in the banking industry, the main consideration should be to enhance the flexibility of the system by applying quality models. Example of such models includes Total Quality Management, Continuous Improvement, Customer Satisfaction analysis, Six Sigma analysis, and others (Talib and Rahman, 2010).

Through the application of the models, the banking system should restructure its entire management system and strategies in order to attain effective the intended change. Majorly, this should start by improving the employee’s skills and engagement. With the continuous improvement of employee’s skills through continuous training and enhanced remuneration, employee performance is considered to significantly improve in terms of performance (Ladhari, Ladhari, and Morales, 2011). Proper employee engagement will also enhance the quality of the bank delivery system through enhanced customer relationships and services. The improvement of organization service quality can also be achieved by creating strategies and goals that will boost the Australian banking system culture. In connection to improving customer service, banks should improve the understanding customer behavior (Bashir, 2013).

Improving Customer-Centric Systems

One of the main important aspect in banking today is customer service experience. To begin with, banks must fully understand every legal detail regarding the customer rights. When customers report a complain, the main understanding is that the main individual believes that his or her rights have been violated during the exchange of services (Ngoc Thuy and Nguyen Hau, 2010). The banking system should be able to effectively look at every issue raised by customers with an immediate response as first as possible. The other important feature on improving customer experience is through effective communication. Every bank organization must develop an effective communication media which must also relate to the effectiveness of how customers are willing and able to participate.

According to Bashir (2013), through effective communication, the main priority that an organization should be able to account is the continuous improvement customer’s engagement. Customer engagement has been described as one of the key aspects which have a significant impact on the achievement of organization goals and objectives. One of the best models that has been very effective in improving customer management relation (CMR) is the use of Six Sigma model (Taleghani, Gilaninia, and Mousavian, 2011). With proper customer engagement strategies, the bank can be able to eliminate most major challenges which according to the case study include poor management, services, and essentially customer dissatisfaction. In the approach of retaining and enhancing customer loyalty, banks should provide a more rewarding environment to the client’s an example being the improvement of loan accessibility and other approaches to recognizing esteemed customers (Kheng, Mahamad, Ramayah, and Mosahab, 2010).

The measurement of customer service can be characterized into two important aspects which majorly comprise of client’s expectation and perception. Customer expectation can be described as the desired quality level of services which the customer expects from the service personnel while perception can be characterized as the final opinion of the customer judging from the quality of service offered (Ramseook-Munhurrun and Naidoo, 2011). Therefore, a gap is only identified in the event there is the different perception from the expected outcome. on the other hand, management perception on customer expectation is another important issue the banking system should be able to consider. The main approach of this should be to improve the service performance gap by identifying challenges such as the poor performance service personnel (Lau, Cheung, Lam, and Chu, 2013). The bank system should be able to create a high customer expectation in the banking system where if there is lower customer expectation it will also reflect lower standards in the organization. Actuall delivery service should be monitored through use of external communication. This is through gathering feedback report from customers and other important on the quality of services offered.

Enhancing Management and Leadership

Conclusion

In summary, there are various reason for developing customer service in an organization especially in the financial sectors. One of the basic requirements is the ability to raise the standard level of organization which will definitely enhance many processes such as effective and quality delivery systems. The rise of the organization standard is mainly contributed by the increase in customer expectation which means also the management has been able to achieve total customer satisfaction. Communication tool is considered one of the key features of developing successful service marketing strategy. Effective communication strategy is considered to have also a wide range of benefits such as encouraging employee participation, customer satisfaction, and most importantly the ability to eliminate some of the major challenges in the business environment (Hafeez and Muhammad, 2012). In the approach of enhancing customer satisfaction in regards to the case study, exceptional customer services should be highly applied to avoid some of the issues which can be fixed easily. Through the application of the above recommendation, I believe the Australian banking system will significantly improve in terms of quality and service standard level.

References

Bashir, M.S., 2013. Analysis of customer satisfaction with the Islamic banking sector: case of Brunei Darussalam. Asian Journal of Business and Management Sciences, 2(10), pp.38-50.

Hafeez, S. and Muhammad, B., 2012. The Impact of Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Programs on Customer’s Loyalty: Evidence from Banking Sector of Pakistan. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 3(16).

Kheng, L.L., Mahamad, O., Ramayah, T. and Mosahab, R., 2010. The impact of service quality on customer loyalty: A study of banks in Penang, Malaysia. International journal of marketing studies, 2(2), p.57.

Ladhari, R., Ladhari, I. and Morales, M., 2011. Bank service quality: comparing Canadian and Tunisian customer perceptions. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 29(3), pp.224-246.

Lau, M.M., Cheung, R., Lam, A.Y. and Chu, Y.T., 2013. Measuring service quality in the banking industry: a Hong Kong based study. Contemporary Management Research, 9(3).

Lovelock, C. and Patterson, P., 2015. Services marketing. Pearson Australia.

Ngoc Thuy, P. and Nguyen Hau, L., 2010. Service personal values and customer loyalty: a study of banking services in a transitional economy. International Journal of Bank Marketing, 28(6), pp.465-478.

Ramseook-Munhurrun, P. and Naidoo, P., 2011. Customers’ perspectives of service quality in Internet banking. Services Marketing Quarterly, 32(4), pp.247-264.

Sultan, P. and Yin Wong, H., 2010. Service quality in higher education–a review and research agenda. International Journal of Quality and Service Sciences, 2(2), pp.259-272.

Taleghani, M., Gilaninia, S. and Mousavian, S.J., 2011. The role of relationship marketing in customer orientation process in the banking industry with focus on loyalty (Case study: Banking industry of Iran). International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2(19).

Talib, F. and Rahman, Z., 2010. Critical success factors of TQM in service organizations: a proposed model. Services Marketing Quarterly, 31(3), pp.363-380.

Talib, F., Rahman, Z. and Qureshi, M.N., 2012. Total quality management in service sector: a literature review. International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, 6(3), pp.259-301.