Holistic Customer Centered Banking

By M. Isi Eromosele

A profitable and sustained competitive advantage can be attained by a banking institution if it is able to deliver customized personalized services at every customer touch point. The Oseme Retail Banking Strategy provides the retail banking sector with a flexible powerful platform for implementing customer relationship management - an intersection of customer relationship management guidelines that can be integrated with multi-channel technologies.

This solution is focused on building competitive advantage through a customized business strategy and an underpinning technology infrastructure based on a holistic view of the bank’s customers. This would be a merged view of all products held by the customer, all services used, contact history and recognition of customer life events, such as a new home purchase or change of job.

The Business Challenge

Regulatory changes have resulted in increased competition among retail banks, brokerages, insurers and non-bank institutions. At the same time, market changes such as globalization have been opening a series of opportunities. As such, banks are facing growing complexities due to technology advances and financial product innovations.

They are being challenged by a mixed array of new delivery channels dominated by the Internet through social media, social networking and social marketing, among others that has greatly expanded the possibilities for customer interactions. Retail banks need new business models to address these challenges and take full advantage of the opportunities presented by the changes that have been taking place in global banking.

Most global retail banks have customarily organized their sales processes and the underpinning technology architectures around a product-centric business model with customer information dispersed across separate and disparate systems.

While there has been some progress made toward moving away from the customized old business models, there needs to be more concerted effort to fully embrace an integrated relationship management business model as the most sustainable and achievable of the emerging models.

This necessitates understanding customers in order to put the right product in the right channel for the right customer at the right time. Building and sustaining business success requires an intense focus on the customer - being able to instantly access thorough information about the customer and using every customer contact point to create and deliver value, which ultimately build long-term customer loyalty.

To put a customer centered business model in place, financial services companies must implement the following:

• Implementing an integrated approach - An integrated solution would provide a merged data source and unified infrastructure required to implement and easily maintain an effective customer centered business environment.
• Increased capacity and flexibility - To stay competitive, retail banks must be able to provide an increasing array of services delivered through multiple delivery channels to their customers. This would be achieved through a flexible, scalable infrastructure that makes it easy to add or enhance their services when and where they are needed and to expand capacity as their customer base grows.
• Provide excellent customer experience - By providing a customized and personalized experience fitted to the needs of every customer, retail banks can increase customer loyalty, thereby increasing their profits.
• Effectively targeting products - Retail banks can increase revenues by cost-effectively targeting personalized products and services to individual customers.

A holistic customer-centered strategy will allow the bank to craft relevant action plans that are meaningful and valuable for customers, leading to increased acquisition of new customers and enhanced retention of existing ones.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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