UBank and NAB explore the online channel

Summary: How do two banks tackle social media? Surprisingly, the focus isn't necessarily on Twitter and Facebook, nor is it about customer service.
Tapping into the internet to help drive business to a bank might sound like a simple matter, but it's not just about setting up a Facebook page and it's not necessarily about customer satisfaction either.

Speaking at Bank Tech 2012 earlier this week, UBank's social media coordinator, Emma Tyler, and National Australia Bank's (NAB) general manager of digital services, Chris Smith, outlined how they were approaching social media use to help drive business.
UBank has a unique customer base: they're tech- and finance-savvy, and spend more time online than the average user. Recognising this, UBank made it a part of its online strategy to move beyond the use of Facebook and Twitter by creating a series of websites that aren't always directly related to its products, but are of interest to its customers.

Customer Experience: Reduce Customer Effort

Words such as "loyalty", "engagement", "community", and "experience" describe a largely false relationship between customers and organizations.
"The IBM Institute for Business Value found that 60-65% of business leaders believe that consumers follow their brands on social media sites because they want to be a part of a community," Patrick Spenner, wrote in Forbes in July 2012. "Only 25-30% of consumers agree. The top reason consumers follow a brand? To get discounts - not exactly ideal for a company's bottom line."

We have noticed in our research that many customers go to social media sites to complain. When they are really ticked off about an organization they use social media to broadcast that annoyance.

Most normal people don't want to be part of the Coca Cola or Pepsi communities. Organizations have abused words such as "community" and "loyalty" for a long time.

There's a need to get real.

Lives Made Much Easier (LiMME)

Lives Made Much Easier (LiMME) is a strategic customer journey improvement project at Barclays and in 2010, Raymond Pettitt (Managing Director) and Lorraine O’Neill (Coventry Head of Contact Centre) put forward Coventry as a proof of concept site to create an environment where cultural enablers and ways of working could be altered to make customers’ lives much easier. Called BLiMME (bringing LiMME to life), a key step was to undertake 300+ customer surveys and 350+ colleague panels, determining what held Barclays back from being ‘best in class’. Performance metrics, previously focused on hygiene factors, were changed; sales targets were removed and customer metrics such as net promoter score (NPS) introduced. A new tool was implemented to provide cross-channel visibility, preventing the need for questions to be repeated or data re-keyed. “This wasn’t just a tick-box exercise” “We gave people the tools to empower them to give a better service the customer." “We moved away from a target-driven environment”.

How to Electrify Your Customer Relationships

What does it take to build a powerful customer relationship? According to Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset, most companies leave untold profits on the table because they assume they only way they can deepen their customer relationships is through the product or service they provide. (Customers will flock to a bank because its interest rates are better, the thinking goes, or because they get a free iPod when they open an account.) But that’s only half the story, says Lee – and it creates a shallow, what’s-in-it-for-me relationship.