KPMG in Ghana has launched an insightful report on customer experience in the banking industry dubbed, ‘Heightened Customer Expectations in the new reality and beyond’ via a Webinar hosted from Accra on 27 October 2020.
The report brings out insights that can help to achieve the right customer experience, which is a critical success factor for building a sustainable financial services industry.
It highlights KPMG’s Six Pillars of customer experience which are essential drivers for creating successful, ethical and sustainable customer experience transformation. The six Pillars have been developed after a decade of research and practice. They are: Expectations, Integrity, Resolution, Time and Effort, Personalization and Empathy.
- Expectations: Managing, meeting and exceeding customer expectations
- Integrity: Being trustworthy and engendering trust
- Resolution: Turning a poor experience into a great one
- Time and Effort: Minimizing customer effort and creating frictionless processes
- Personalization: Using individualized attention to drive an emotional connection
- Empathy: Achieving an understanding of the customer’s circumstances to drive deep rapport
The report demonstrates how retail banks in Ghana have performed across all the Six Pillars.
As customers’ expectations have evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative that banks that already have digital service offerings take advantage of this opportunity by continuing to enhance the experiences of their customers while keeping them safe.
The banking industry is now big on customer-experience, hence, banks that do not grasp the opportunity to delight their customers will lag behind competition. The journey of customer experience should, however, go hand in hand with digital transformation as the appropriate digital platform offer the channels to most customer needs and expectations.
Mrs. Elsie Addo Awadzi, the Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana, in launching the report said, “I am particularly impressed with the breadth and depth of the report. The report clearly shows that banks have become more resilient and agile even in the midst of the ongoing pandemic following our recent banking sector reforms, and banks that understand customer needs, prioritise customer satisfaction and adapt quickly to changing market dynamics will retain the trust and loyalty of their customers. I sincerely hope that banks will leverage the insights contained in this report to better serve the Ghanaian banking public. Meanwhile, the Bank of Ghana has intensified supervision of banks to promote transparency, integrity, and safety in transactions between banks and their customers, and the provision of adequate and timely redress for customer grievances.”
The Senior Partner of KPMG in Ghana, Mr. Anthony Sarpong called on the banking industry to leverage the insights on customer experience presented in the report to help them define the customer and digital strategies to create value for their stakeholders in the new reality of our world.
He said that, “the Expectation Pillar is the strongest for increasing customer loyalty and scored highest with a score of 76.5% while the Integrity Pillar scored the least (65.9%) in our survey – an area of concern for customers that banks must improve on. KPMG stands ready to journey with banks on this road to customer experience and digital transformation.”
Over the years, KPMG has conducted a number of surveys targeted at the customer. The surveys have been designed to gain insights into their experiences with diverse brands. In 2019, KPMG in Ghana published a Millennial Banking Customer thought leadership titled “Banking on the future”.
This thought leadership provided deep insights into the growing millennial segment, their preferences and expectations.
For the 2020 report, KPMG administered questionnaires online to banking customers aged 18 and over. The survey was conducted between April and June 2020, receiving responses from banking customers across regions of Ghana.
The survey explored Ghanaian banking customers’ expectations in achieving their overall customer experience.
