SA online banking lacks maturity

Local banks' online service offerings still lack maturity. For the most part, the banks do not see the customer as king, or understand the way customers experience banking Web sites since customers generally do not voice their frustrations with online services.

This view is borne out by international research conducted by Gartner and Response Tek, which interviewed 200 CIOs of online retailers and financial institutions.

On average, 78% of the respondents' customers were happy with their online experience. However, more than one in five, or 22%, were dissatisfied - and of these dissatisfied customers, only 2% bothered to complain.

Compuware's interactions with local banks suggest statistics in South Africa are not far off these figures. While South African banks have implemented some of the most advanced technology systems in the world, the major challenge they face is not how their technology performs, but rather understanding how end-users experience their sites. While most banks have implemented methodologies to sample end-user experience by simulating it, knowledge of the average user experience is not necessarily enough to understand the client base's real satisfaction or dissatisfaction. And since local consumers of Internet banking services do not report their complaints, an understanding of real customer sentiment is very difficult to come by.

This customer apathy is reflected in recent media reports, which claim that fewer than one in seven online banking customers of a particular bank were using a security feature made available by that bank. This led to the feature being scrapped - just one anecdotal symptom of the apathy shown by online banking clients towards security.

It may also be that some banks do not make feedback systems sufficiently easy for customers to use, or that customers are not incentivised to give their feedback. South African banks are, however, not alone: only 6% of the CIOs questioned in the research said their systems gave them real-time insight into actual end-user experience.

The banks need to shift their paradigms from technology, servers and networks to protecting customers' experience and their own revenue streams.

The agentless solution:

In order to effectively improve customers' experience, banks should monitor and understand each individual customer's online experience by ensuring they have "line of sight" to every user. This can be done through implementing an agentless solution which monitors each customer's interaction with the online banking site and the type of experience they have on the site.

Improving the customer experience will not only lower the risk of customer churn, but also reduce the load on call centres and branches. Should a customer phone the call centre, an agentless solution would provide the agent concerned with detailed information on what transaction the customer was performing and what problem they had encountered.

Perhaps most importantly, call centre agents can use agentless solutions to analyse whether the problem lies with the online banking site or whether it is being caused by the service provider they are connecting through or the customer's own equipment.

The research showed that 74% of respondents did not monitor the impact that a user's Internet service provider (ISP) had on the experience of their users.

Some of the problems customers experience, including slow download speeds or being unable to connect to the Internet, can be caused by problems at their service providers and not the bank's Web site. These problems could drive customers away and undermine the bank's brand. However, if a call centre agent is able to identify the problem and point it out the client, negative sentiments towards the bank can be mitigated.

An agentless solution provides details on where the user is connecting from, what type of infrastructure they are using (dialup, ADSL, etc), who they are, what transactions they are performing and the speed of these transactions. Alerts can be set around these areas so that, for example, if a user's transaction takes too long, the transaction can be flagged and investigated.

Protecting user experience is ultimately about protecting revenue streams. Even if a user does not change banks, a call to the call centre or access via another channel like the branch increases the bank's costs.

Other reasons for local online customer service not being as mature as banks abroad include lack of real competition between local banks and the lack of Internet penetration into the market. As competition and Internet penetration increase, banks will require an increased focus on customer service because as more customers come online, so the potential for calls to call centres increases.

One of the banks will need to put its stake in the ground, and the others will follow suit. The banks which are able to improve service levels and effectively manage the end-user experience will potentially better retain their current clientele and gain more clients going forward.