Time to dust off this old blog because I am dying to put some ideas regarding my recent customer experiences on paper because who doesn’t like learning from other people’s mistakes rather than their own!? I definitely do.
If you have been reading up on marketing communication then you have probably come across recommendations to try out the whole existing customer journey to see what works and what doesn’t and where there is room for improvement. Yet, how often do we really take time to do that? I suppose most of us fall in the trap of trying to put out fires – or take care of urgent requests just trusting that the people requesting these have put in the time and effort to analyze that their idea is actually worth executing but that is a topic for another time.
What is also very visible and obvious for a customer is when in a company the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing and it is difficult to ensure that all are up to date. Especially in big organisations. Things fall through the cracks.
This week I have felt like a guinea pig for a new(ish) banking service. A tester of their systems if you will except I am not getting paid for it. I have been trying to give them my money instead.
So I decided to move my savings to a new bank – one with a decent interest rate in these crazy times we live. They are all digital so also applying for an account was all digital.
The beginning was smooth – nice user interface, good messages. I started filling in my personal info but then it got interesting. They cater internationally so their system was supporting the way things work in Sweden but I am not a typical Swedish customer. I also happened to answer yes to the question if I foresee any international transactions and then it got confusing. If you are asked about amounts that you plan to move by a Danish bank but as a Swedish customer to a third country, which currency should you use? I still don’t know. Their application didn’t specify.
And if you are asked to upload a scan of your passport or driver’s license, I bet you too grab the little card that you already have at hand. ID card was not an option for some reason. Only after submitting the form I got an email with explanations of what they really want. I as a Swedish resident but not a citizen I apparently cannot use my Swedish driver’s license because it doesn’t show my citizenship. So now the process was already unnecessarily more complex for both me and the bank while if they had thought this scenario through, it could have been solved correctly instantly. All it would have required was a few more words of explanation and of course thinking through some potential customer personas.
Moving on to the 2nd part of my experience, I got an automatic confirmation email after submitting my application. It was very nice with a list of all the good things I will soon be getting by them except someone had not kept track of all the marketing assets that contain info about their interest rates so this email was not up to date.
You already know that the following day I got an information request over email explaining some things that I was supposed to do differently as well as requesting more documents about my finances. It was also asking me again about my international transfers intentions while saying that they don’t really have this service right now but want the info for future. As a customer – or a person in general – I don’t like my time being wasted. I did not sign up for market research survey. If you need to do it for legal reasons, say that. If not, then you should not be collecting any more personal information that you actually need.
I was now asked to share a bunch of documents from different systems and upload via their app. As a digital marketer I feel quite confident about executing such things and yet no matter what I tried, their file uploading just didn’t work. I had to turn to support.
Their app referred me to a chat function which is great when you need to talk to someone fast, but it also had a note that on average they answer chat within one day. Day!!! Answering so slowly means that the chat has no point. No-one waits online that long. Chat is the modern hip thing but is it really a good idea to implement if you cannot guarantee fast responses? Anything more than five minutes seems too long to me, not to mention hours or days. Of course I could not stay to wait. Foodora, a Swedish food courier company is on the other hand a company that really does chat support very well so it can be done.
Since chat wasn’t really working, I responded to the email I had gotten that I was struggling with the app and was then told to email the documents but not to the person I was emailing with. No, I had to send them to another address and then write back to the first person that I had sent stuff. Do you like being made to run around with tasks? Probably not. I went along and emailed my documents to the right place but of course forgot to send the 2nd email about sending documents. Ideally a good CRM system should keep track of all of our communication anyway and customer support personnel should check all previous interactions before initiating a new one. Often reality is quite different.
Soon I was asked for another document over email. I sent that too as soon as I could to the person asking. The day after I got a response that if I don’t answer in 2 days, they will reject my application. I was totally confused because I didn’t know what I hadn’t answered to but I was put off a bit about this threat.
Almost simultaneously I got another email from the same person telling me that they cannot accept documents by email and I should upload the latest document to app. She didn’t even seem to realise she just sent the same person two emails. Secondly, she had already forgotten about my initial problem with app and uploads as well as her own advice to email them documents. I was getting fed up and can you blame me!? If she had just bothered to read once again through our email conversation which was branched out now between two addresses on their own request, making it harder to follow, she could have easily turned this into a much better experience instead of giving me mixed messages and threats and useless advice. I might sound mad because I am a bit. I am quite a patient customer but I was really starting to consider if it is worth it anymore. Perhaps I could just turn to another bank with lower interest rate but with better service for peace of mind.
They finally received my last document but were still not happy. Apparently it didn’t have my name on it which is another requirement that they didn’t communicate earlier. I was now told to take a print screen of my main bank’s app with my name and account number. A bit unconventional but sounds simple enough, right? And I was appreciating them trying to find solutions now. Yet it was another mission impossible with my home bank. There just isn’t any such view. No “Hey, Maria! This is how much money you have on account X”. No matter how much I would like to comply with their requirements, I cannot really influence how a bank formats their statements nor app. Had they really not come across that before?
The story isn’t over yet and I don’t know how it will end but I stumbled on so many communication issues already, of which many which have been (quite) easily avoided. Things that illustrate so well how important it is to test customer journey and from different customers’ perspectives if possible. Also, how important it is to test and monitor your assets also after successful launch. And last but not least, how important having a holistic picture of your customer interactions is.
What did you learn?