With that in mind, he said that banks should continue to press forward to deliver more services that support changing lifestyles—remote deposits, personal financial management tools and easy-to-use digital payment systems. “The status quo will not be acceptable for long,” Larrabee said.
And customers are doing a lot more than just checking their balances, said Joe Freeman, president of Pioneer Services, a division of MidCountry Bank. “Today, more than half of our loans are made through online or mobile channels. Site visits on mobile devices have doubled year-over-year, making up nearly 30 percent of our overall Web traffic. Online applications from mobile devices are up 200 percent over the previous year.”
New processes and customer-facing tools, Freeman said, have led to higher levels of customer satisfaction by allowing customers to interact with the bank on their terms. Higher satisfaction levels, he said, would yield an increase in repeat business and increased referrals.
“Online/mobile/phone processes are much more scalable to handle increased growth than the face-to-face model or our brick-and-mortar locations,” Freeman said. “The more parts of the process we make ‘self-serve,’ the fewer resources are required on our end to provide the same level of customer service.”
Freeman says the bank has a presence on several social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+. He says the bank’s social media plan is in three fundamental areas. “The first is brand awareness,” he says, “and offering a way for customers and potential customers to engage with us outside of a transaction.” The second is to monitor comments about the company’s brand or comments from customers. “In several occasions, we have used social media to reach out to these customers to resolve outstanding issues with a goal being 100 percent customer satisfaction.” Last, the bank uses those media channels for financial education purposes, which includes podcasts on iTunes and video podcasts on YouTube.
When it comes to a mobile client base, perhaps no bank in the region faces the kinds of challenges—and rises to them—quite like Armed Forces Bank, a division of Dickinson Financial Corp.
“As a military bank with a highly mobile customer base, our clients bank with Armed Forces Bank at home, in foreign countries and on ships at sea,” said Paul Holewinski, the bank’s chief executive. “It is extremely important to them that the bank be available anytime, anywhere, anyplace.”
To meet that need, Armed Forces is upgrading its online and mobile channel this year, with a goal of significantly enhancing the customer experience, he said. “As a result of the emergence and adoption of smart phones within the U.S. and our customer base, three-way ‘triple play’ access to account information—via mobile text, mobile web and through smart phone mobile apps—has become a minimum cost of entry,” he said, and the bank is marshaling its response to a spike in tablet based applications that will follow.
He also noted the disruptive nature of the new technologies, which have given fast-responding banks an opportunity to snag market share.
“The cost of online and mobile banking is great in terms of dollars and company resources,” Holewinski said. “However, we believe that e-banking is the banking of the present and the future for our target customers. Most banks have some version of on-line banking but less than 50 percent of all banks have deployed mobile banking at this time.”
In the next five years, he said, mobile banking would become the fastest-growing banking channel, and bankers had better be as smart as their smart-phone customers.
Joyce Stacer, senior vice president with Metcalf Bank, said officials there are continually look for ways to connect with customers and increase customer satisfaction: “Our goal is to allow customers access to their banking information in any way they choose. Online and mobile banking are just another way we are available to assist them.”
The biggest challenge, she said, is the continued increase in resources required to stay out front with the products. It’s one thing for organizations on the scale of Commerce Bank or UMB—to throw money at new technologies and the staff needed to master them; it’s another for community banks with asset levels of less than $1 billion.
“We realize the technology will continue to evolve and we must remain fluid to offer new enhancements to our product offerings,” Stacer said. Adapting quickly and easily will be key. We are building the infrastructure now that will allow us to adjust to innovations of the future.”
Now if only they could figure out where that future is going to take them . . .