Customers Of The World Unite, You Have Nothing To Lose But The Call Center Hold Music

Around the end of 2009, my HP OfficeJet printer broke down. I logged a call with the local office of Hewlett Packard’s service partner. I got no response for three days. I gave up with the vendor’s local office and decided to escalate my complaint to its head office. Thankfully, the company’s Vice President for … Read more

Whither Cross Selling & Upselling With eBills & eStatements?

For a long time, I’ve been hearing about how electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) solutions enable billers to do more cross-selling and upselling. For the uninitiated, EBPP, among other things, generates paperless versions of bills and statements and publishes them on portals or emails them as PDF attachments, or both; the term “billers” collectively … Read more

Pushing The Envelope On Technology – Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog post, I had lauded ICICI Bank for pushing the envelope on adopting cutting edge banking technologies by launching a Facebook App and Online Account Opening offering. In this Part 2, let me share the results of my personal experience with these initiatives and voice a few concerns around their … Read more

Say Goodbye To Leakages & Delays In Handling Leads

Good news for banks, e-commerce, insurers, IT, universities and other organizations who generate a large volume of leads from their website. The new “Rocket Routing” feature of our EMAIL360 website leadgen application automatically routes leads for different products and services to different people in these companies – and, that too, in realtime. With EMAIL360, sales and … Read more

Pushing The Envelope On Technology – Part 1

Banks have the opportunity to cut costs and enhance customer experience by adopting mobile, social media and other cutting edge technologies. However, most of them drag their feet on being innovative, often citing security concerns, regulatory constraints, and so on. For example, statutory KYC requirements precluding 100% online and automated account opening by forcing banks … Read more

Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon – Part 3

In Part-1 of this blog post, we’d described multichannel banking. In Part-2, we’d introduced the concept of omnichannel retailing. In this concluding part, we’ll explain what omnichannel behavior could mean in the context of retail banking and suggest ways by which banks could jump on to the omnichannel bandwagon even if they didn’t / couldn’t fix shortcomings in their … Read more

Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon – Part 2

In Part-1 of this blog post, we introduced the concept of omnichannel banking and explained how it differed from multichannel banking. We’d claimed that 100% multichannel support was neither necessary nor practical. In this Part-2, we’ll explain why. While banks have traditionally viewed their relationship with customers through the prism of channels, customers don’t necessarily … Read more

Differentiate Your Product By Going The Extra Mile – Part 3

When I wrote Differentiate Your Product By Going The Extra Mile – Part 2, I’d meant it to be the second and concluding post. But, I recently came across a few more updates – some positive and some not so positive – on this subject that I thought I must share, hence this third part. One, as … Read more

Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon – Part 1

Enough and more has been written about how banks lack fully fledged multichannel support. For the uninitiated, a “channel” refers to the medium of communication between customers and businesses such as retail banks. Branch, Phone (call center), ATM, Internet Banking, Mobile Banking and Social Networking are typical channels in the context of a retail bank. “Multichannel … Read more