Financial Services Six Sigma

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal on September 15-16, 2007 contained an article titled “Customer Service Is Best For Banks” by Liam Pleven.  The article was based on research conducted by Sandler O’Neil & Partners (an investment bank) through visits at 12 NYC banks. The researchers evaluated 3 branches of each bank on the following criteria:

            - Wait time
            - Branch appearance
            - Staff professionalism

In the article we were provided with some of the findings that the researchers came away with and quite frankly I am wondering why these “indicators” were selected to measure customer service (the reason dawned on me later on…and I will explain).  For example one of the Sandler O’Neil & Partners researchers told a banking representative that he was banking at a rival institution (as a means to solicit feedback).  The representative then made a disparaging comment about the other bank – this was deemed poor customer service.  Another example of ‘bad’ customer service – as determined by the researchers was being handed a “94 page brochure”.  While these may not be shining examples of good service, they hardly qualify as explanations for why a customer may leave a bank or have a complaint. 

While I care about wait time when standing in line, I don’t feel that rating the appearance of an institution will give us an indication of their customer service level.  Yes, a good lawyer could make a case for appearance having much to do with customers being content…but here we are not in a court of law or an attorney’s office.

Unfortunately the article didn’t really help define Service Excellence and how to measure it.  And frankly they couldn’t because the researchers’ hands were tied, here is why:

1. To measure Excellence you need the voice of your customers – especially the ones that left you or did not select you & industry benchmark data (what your competitors are doing)

2. When you think about a bank branch, given the thousands of transactions initiated therein - wire transfers, money orders, new account opening - the majority of them are completed in the back office.  It is there that errors are caught or generated because of poor data collection.  These errors most often lead to customer complaints or transaction errors.

And so to really measure Service Excellence you need access to process and customer data.   An investment bank conducting an undercover study will not have this information – they only see and experience a small part of the picture: the branch. Unfortunately, this forces the researcher to rely on cursory and somewhat meaningless measures to define the performance of a bank. 

S. Shahbazi ProcessArc, Inc. - Financial Services Six Sigma