Authors:
Nicole Kahmer
1
and
Juergen Moormann
2
Affiliations:
1
Fidelity Investment Services GmbH, Germany
;
2
HfB – Business School of Finance and Management, Germany
Keyword(s):
Banking industry, Customer processes, Internet banking, Web site ranking
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
B2B, B2C and C2C
;
B2C/B2B Considerations
;
Business and Social Applications
;
Communication and Software Technologies and Architectures
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
Banks continually claim to supply customer-orientated services. However, banking services are still focused on purely delivering financial products. Customers will usually receive financial products but often no specific solution to their true problem. In that way, customers’ perception of banking services is often far from satisfaction. In addition, important targets of marketing strategy (e.g., customer loyalty, cross- and up-selling) do not get achieved. Therefore, the consistent alignment of financial services to customer processes becomes increasingly important and will significantly enhance the competitiveness of banks. This paper investigates the extent of customer support provided by banks with respect to the customers’ problem solving process. The study focuses on the Internet as one of several customer interfaces within a multi-channel approach. The paper delivers the theoretical framework of customer processes and provides an empirical identification of customer processes.
The main part of the study is represented by the evaluation of 100 Web sites of banks. As a result, the paper reveals that most of the analyzed Web sites fail to assist customers within their processes. However, the idea of supporting customer processes is spreading. It will become a major challenge to transform the banks’ traditional product-driven view into a consequent customer-driven approach.
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