Achieving High Performance in Banking in India through Customer Centricity

Banks in India are at a particularly defining moment in their relationships with their customers.

As they face up to the unique combination of rising expectations of customers and the post credit-crunch costs squeeze, Indian banks have a major one-off opportunity to drive a radical front-office change programme that will simultaneously transform their customer experience and their cost base, thereby positioning them for future high performance.

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Around the world, financial services customers are changing and customers in India are at the forefront of this shift. As well as becoming increasingly well-informed and demanding, customers today are more likely than ever before to grow dissatisfied and switch their financial services suppliers if the experience and service they receive fails to meet their expectations.

In Accenture’s view, the tools and technologies are available for banks and other financial services companies to deliver highly personalised products, services and experiences to specific customers.

Indian banks face three key impediments to high performance in delivering their customer service experience, each related to different forms of complexity. These key issues are:

Increasing Customer Complexity

• Confusion caused by multiple products that meet the same need.
• Frustration caused by duplicated information requests.
• Inefficiency caused by dealing with different applications/platforms to complete a business process.
  
  

Increasing Back-Office Complexity

• Duplication of processes and resources.
• Over-sized products catalogue, with many unprofitable products.
  
  

Increasing IT Complexity

• Duplication of "siloed" capabilities without industrialisation via sharing of a central data warehouse.
• Multiplicity of application interfaces.
  
  

However, more positively, these challenges and change drivers also signal a significant opportunity for those players that differentiate themselves successfully by getting the customer experience right and turning their customers into active advocates. 

Accenture’s High Performance Banking framework defines how to put all the components of customer centric banking together—the operating model, architecture and business processes. Our many years of experience of working with leading banks worldwide on such projects has enabled us to define key imperatives that banks need to address to differentiate their customer proposition and progressively improve top-line performance.

The required changes can be categorised into four main areas,

• Change frontline behaviors
• Implement differentiation and simplification strategies
• Enhance front-office architecture
• Refine accountability and metrics
  
  

These four elements combine into a virtuous circle, driving customer experience and business performance progressively higher over time. Contact us to find out how Accenture can help your bank to transform its front office and move towards High Performance.