Customer service banking! HSBC the best!

By Patrick Mayoh

I am so proud to say I made up this title (well I hope I am right). Alright most people have heard of investment banking, retail banking or consumer banking. But then looking at the UK banking industry coming up with such a term as customer service banking is not so strange. On the contrary I would say it is trendy. Hitherto it was common practice and it might be still the case to offer the best products or services to customers. Competition according to Michael Porter (1979) cost, leadership, differentiation and focus are usually the main strategic options deployed by organizations depending on the size of the market, the importance of the industry and the market shares by an organization. so let us say up to now the big banks have played on leadership; something like " we want to be the best in terms of the way we manage customers'accounts as well how fast and how well we can make cash available to customers when they need to get a mortgage and etc..." But then today differentiation seems to be the order of the day. Alright let us say HSBC might be one of the best financial establishment around (just hypothetically) but then it does not just want to offer products or benefits Natwest, Barclays, Santander and the rest already offer. HSBC might also want to be known for the way it treats its customers which is the main point made by this article. Where leadership in terms of offering the best services to customers used to be the main strategic options, today differentiation in customer care appears to be the new strategic option.

Take for example the article published by love money.com last week about the worst banks for customer service and then think of this new customer charter released by RBS and Natwest just a couple of months ago or even take for example the Halifax reward scheme which stipulates that the bank rewards one of its most loyal customer on a monthly basis with £5 and you have a pretty big overview of what is happening today within the industry.

Lovemoney. com actually reveals that the Bank of scotland just has an overall score of 43% in terms of customer service, well more than half of the customers are unhappy, very bad.

And then interestingly Halifax part of the Lloyds group got an overall 53% in terms of customer satisfaction.

So time for the winner, in third position the Co-Op emphasis on fairness and integrity coupled with a strong sense of ethics seems to be quite appealing to Britons; so let us go to the runner up One Account funded by Virgin and acquired by RBS with an overall 81% of customer satisfaction. And to the winner...........HSBC (what else?) with an overall 82% in terms of customer satisfaction. The figures in themselves are eloquent about the strong competition within the UK industry so I believe a couple of lessons can be drawn from all those figures. I will boil them down to three.

The first lesson is those banks that have from the beginning engineered and implemented customer care will more likely succeed and compete better in the market place than those banks who do not. In fact it does not come as a surprise that over the year HSBC --with its a very smiling and helpful customer reps--has collected numerous awards for its strong banking performance and customer care.

Secondly those banks that rapidly take measures to correct their images in the eyes of both customers and the public at large stand a good chance of catching up and possibly claiming a top position among the elites. In this sense I think RBS and Natwest's customer charter is very instructive and illustrative of my point. It might just be a couple of statements designed to project an excessive emphasis on the bank's renewed determination to win customers' support and approval but it will eventually go a long way if properly executed and reviewed and iterated towards changing the bank image.

Thirdly UK banks should be wary of globalisation as it becomes increasingly easier for foreign banking institutions to move operations in the city of London. Santander might not yet occupy a good position in terms of a top banks as it does in Spain but provided the right strategic change and focus it might a big player to reckon with in the future. Easier entry into the banking industry in the UK will just weaken competitors and therefore innovative means to attract and retain customers will be crucial as the same products and services will become available throughout all agencies.

Conclusively Kim and Mauborgne (1997) in their book value innovation came up with the concept of blue ocean strategy which is simply put the action which consists for an organization within a particular industry to make the competitions or competitors irrelevant through innovation. Customer service banking might probably be in the future the subject of much more research and innovation in the banking industry.

See you next week hopefully

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Brainstorming like De Bono

 By Patrick Mayoh

 Brainstorming is very much part of the Franca lingua of many organizations. Simply put it is a process where a group as a team gets to explore all available ideas, possibilities and alternatives just to name a few; pertaining to a specific issue. Brainstorming is actually quite handy when a team does not have a clear perspective of a problem and has to conceptualize and think from scratch. Also the fact that all propositions from group members are taken into consideration make brainstorming less stressing and demanding from other types meetings, as a matter of fact it is the opportunity to think out of the box and maybe for someone to come up with a proposition that creates the “waouh” effect. The fact that brainstorming is used in everyday life --like for example when you want to decide how to prepare that surprise party for your mum or when your colleagues sit around to decide on the gift to offer a colleague on his last day at the office-- makes it a very popular tool within and outside organizations. The big question is: why do we brainstorm? And what types of results can we expect to get after a brainstorming session? And most especially what does it take to do it the right way? A couple of weeks ago I read about a very interesting model called the “six thinking hats” on brainstorming by a management thinker called Edward De Bono who articulated a very structured framework meant to make brainstorming sessions in organizations more effective and probably more result oriented. I would definitely recommend to any manager for consideration. But first let us get back to those questions about brainstorming.

Why do we need to brainstorm?

Well I can think of many reasons why but I will boil them down to four.

Say your Boss leaves you an email inviting you for a brainstorming lunch about your marketing campaign in the London Art’s fair. In this case I presume the meeting would be all about what your team could do to create awareness about your organization in terms of the way you represent your organization its products and services. The idea in this sense is to come up with a plan of action, detailing all aspects your team will take into consideration for the success of your marketing campaign.

Right, let us say three days later your boss drops a voice mail on your blackberry inviting you for a meeting into his office. In this case having decided and agreed on what your group is doing, you now have to allocate tasks and responsibilities for specific parts of the projects. It is true this could be done in the first meeting but some projects might be so significant in scope that, many meeting between team members are usually required to decide who does what, why and how. So at the end of the day the project management team breaks up the assignment in sub-assignments for each member of the group and brainstorms on what part each should contribute to the overall project.

Right sometimes brainstorming is all about improving or ameliorating a product or service. This can be very effective in terms of idea generation. Say a new service launched by your customer service department has reached its decline on the life cycle curve; your manager decides to assemble a team of your department and gets you to think about things you might improve about the service and how you can make it better for the next one.

Sometimes your Research and Development Director might get your team to think about a new product or service for the market. About a new device or a gadget that could change the world. This is about your team sitting down and jotting down a few points about the new product and service and coming up with a project designed to kick start the new assignment.

In conclusion from an organizational perspective brainstorming is all about four specific points:

· Generating an action plan

· Agreeing on a course of action

· Improving existing products and services

· Creating new ones

What types of results does brainstorming yield?

Well you can actually expect a good number of results to emerge from a good and effective brainstorming session. In most cases a team will emerge with:

· A strategy

· A clearer understanding of an issue

· A new product or service

· A definite solution to a problem

Usually a brainstorming team will sit to get a focus, a strong sense of direction to arrive at specific answers at the end. The end product in many cases will look like any of the following:

A brainstorming session will usually be about finding direction. Say your manager needs to consider entry strategy for that new market in India, as a group your job will be to reflect on all the possibilities available and possibly settle for the best one or the most likely to yield positive results.

A group sitting together as part of a brainstorming session will usually perceive a problem or a situation better than individuals thinking on their own. The reason being teamwork will always deliver the best results possible than individual work. Actually synergising all the available minds to a group only increases the chances for a team to gain more solutions than when individuals have to work separately from one another.

Interestingly a team will usually use brainstorming to chip in those ideas out of the box that make great product or service. In more formal types of meetings this could be rather cumbersome. But brainstorming technically means free initiative and thinking are readily encouraged and therefore because the potential for freedom of thought is greater more ideas will be available for the group.

Having considered all the options available to a team brainstorming will help the group to look through all the alternatives and possibly decide on which one is best.

Having looked at the dynamics of brainstorming let us have a look at what Edward De Bono had to say on the topic. I must say I read it a couple of weeks ago and I was so impressed at this way of brainstorming, it was quite revolutionary for me.

Up to now I had pictured brainstorming as a time where people come and sit together and just think about anything going through their minds. This is what I have seen in a couple of cases, but then although free thinking is encouraged it did not make sense to me especially because it seems to be done so randomly without a proper focus. It even makes it difficult at the end to decide who said what and why. So the whole idea just loses its attractiveness.

So Dr Edward De Bono suggests that people make better decisions when they are forced to think out of their normal way and goes on to recommend the “six hats”. Six simply because each hat has a different colour and therefore leads the group to think in a particular fashion; the model has the merit of creating a very focussed but deliberate brainstorming session where all the members productively contribute to the exercise. The six hats where:

· The white one represents information about an issue

· The red one intuition or feelings about a case

· Black the downsides of a problem

· Yellow the advantages to a situation

· The green all the possibilities and

· The blue the summary of a particular situation

Could be summarized in the following way:

Hats	Focus	Questions
White	· Information · Facts · Data	· What do we know already about this · What information do we need · Are there secondary data on the issue · Can we collect data
Red	· Feelings · Intuition	· How do we feel about the proposed course of actions · Is it likely to fail or succeed · Are we being too optimistic or pessimistic
Black	· Downsides · Pitfalls · Inconvenient · Disadvantages · Pessimism	· What could possibly go wrong · Why could it not work · Can we really do this
Yellow	· Advantages · Potentials for success · Optimism · opportunities	· Any reason to believe it could work? · Why should we feel good about this · Why is it a fantastic plan or idea? · Will we succeed?
Green	· Possibilities · New ideas · Creative thinking	· Is there a credible alternative to this? · Can we explore any other possibility · Is there anything we have not devoted our attention to · What else could we do · What about option b?
Blue	· Summary · Breaking it down	· What have we learned? · What are the main points? · What is the final decision?

Provided a team does this in an orderly and focussed way the results could be amazing and beyond expectations. Brainstorming in this way ceases to be a meeting where every team member just throws in whatever comes through his mind to become a productive activity where the team arrives at a specific answer at the end.

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