The Banking Industry and Customer Research

Marketing research is very important component of a business used to identify and define the opportunities and problems that they will encounter on the market. The aim

The Royal Bank of Canada using CRM and customer profitability tools to gain a competitive advantage in Canada's increasingly crowded financial services market.

Armstrong’s team used branch-level data from the CSI system as the primary source of research. As a result the concept of “comfortable banking” is directly translated into customers satisfaction during their interaction with tellers in the bank, since almost every criteria in the CSI is measuring representative service behaviors. One thing that the team failed to see is that “comfortable banking” could include a much wider scope of services that customers value therefore consider important to their experience: the products itself and services provided outside the bank for instance. According to Armstrong, “comfortable banking” positioning stands for the branding of the overall experience TD Canada Trust delivers to its clients. The financial products, as the core business of any banks throughout the world, should be counted as part of the service, too.

Based on segments, customer centric offerings are to be offered. Each customer has their own liking and disliking as well as proper planning. The right time to offer also plays an important role. This will avoid unnecessary mailers/calls to be made. Customers normally tend to ignore mass mailers and emails which are sent on regular intervals as they feel that they are junk mail. It is also important to determine the best channel of communication the customer is most likely to respond to. Valuable resources and time is saved and also frees marketing resources to concentrate on other customer and plan for newer programs. Overall, we can work with our customers on helping us improve our customer service and provide the quality service that the customers deserve. It is in this endeavor to have a sustaining model to keep the customer engaged throughout their relationship with the bank for growth and profits in the long run.

At the time where competition became a reality for banks, Jyske Bank decided to make a major personality transformation from a traditional bank to a unique and different one. The new concept emerged from the values of society and the changing economy, and its main goal was to make banking more fun and less pretentious. This report will discuss the case study of “People, Service & Profit at JYSKE Bank” and will provide a detailed analysis of their marketing mix and how they modernized the 7 P’s to suit the changing customer needs.

From an operational viewpoint, banks are trying to incorporate technology in their product offerings, such as advanced banking and financial-related mobile applications. Innovations are made with the assistance of learnings from customer information and data analysis, which are an essential part of analytical CRM. The strategic view also suggests that banks are building a social presence on online platforms to enhance customer engagement and build a long-term relationships with their customers. The above approaches can clearly be identified when looking at CBA and NAB customer relationship management strategies. With its high-tech ATMS and state-of-the-art Commonwealth mobile app, CBA has full product leadership in the market, enabling them to have a competitive advantage when attracting new prospects or customer retention. On the other hand, NAB use customer intimacy as their core CRM strategy, cutting their product offerings in half and make consumers more centrally focused. They are very responsive in customers' needs and wants; and is the leading brand when it comes to customer

In recent news, Bank of America publically announced its plan to make changes to debit card customer accounts in 2012 (Chang, 2011, NBC San Diego). To date, Bank of America has a “fee-free” policy on these types of accounts however; new regulations on debit card accounts are a hindrance to the Bank’s ability to maximize return on investments. As a result the bank is considering implementing a surcharge on checking accounts. However, the bank must determine if this will affect the attitudes and behaviors of customers. To achieve this, Bank of America must conduct business research.

After careful thought and internal discussion, the research general topic of interest to me is the marketing aspects of the banking industry. Considering this are of research, I have further narrowed down this subject into three areas of interest in which to draw a more specific doctoral thesis to pursue.

Century National Bank has offices in several cities in the Midwest and the southeastern part of the United States. Mr. Dan Selig, president and CEO, would like to know the characteristics of his checking account customer. To better understand the customers, Mr. Selig asked Ms. Wendy Lamberg, director of planning, to select a sample of customers and prepare a report. To begin, she has appointed a team from her staff and the team has selected a random sample of 60 customers. All the information gathered is tabulated in the table below:

BBVA Compass is the fifteenth-largest bank in America. In December 2010, they considered about how to allocate the bank’s marketing budget in order to improve the brand awareness and market share. Based on the data and time line provided in the case material, this essay will use expected Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) to measure customer attractiveness versus customer profitability in their marketing decision making.

In 1996, Citibank was an emergent banking institution attempting to increase its market share in the competitive Los Angeles area. In order to do so, the bank’s strategy was to focus slightly less on their financial growth, and much more on providing “a high level of service to its customers”. Management viewed this paradigm shift as “critical to the long term success of the franchise”.

Marketing research is "the process that associates the consumers, customers, and end users to the marketer through information — information used to classify and describe marketing prospects and problems; generate, refine, and evaluate marketing actions; monitor marketing performance; and development understanding of marketing as a process. Marketing research identifies the information required to address these issues, designs the method for collecting information, manages and implements the data collection process, analyzes the results, and communicates the findings and their implications. This is the systematic collecting, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about problems relating to marketing products and services. The aim of marketing research is to classify and evaluate how changing components of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior.

Marketing an intangible product becomes even more difficult in the Bank of America. The ability to a branch to render quality services is very impossible to market. How can you grade one branch against the other, because there are thousands of branches of Bank of America out there and the success of banking also depends on the ability of the customers to corporate. Thus, in such a case, you need to market customers results to bring attention to Bank of America and the employees. You need to show the excellent results which the employees has given because the service in itself is intangible service.

Menton Bank had historically focused on corporate businesses, an its share of the retail consumer banking business ha declined in the face of a aggressive competition from other financial institutions. Menton Bank’s new focus is on customer service, trying developing a stronger consumer orientation at the retail level. The goal is to seize the initiative in marketing the ever increasing array of financial services now available to retail customers (Lovelock, Wirtz, pg. 521)

You are invited to take part in the research questionnaire designed to investigate about the customer service in Indian banks. Taking part involves completing a short questionnaire based on your experience.