Most retail banks in India take pride in saying they are savvy-both when it comes to using technology and sensing retail customer needs.
But a survey of top 14 banks in India says none of the Indian banks-foreign or domestic-made a proactive attempt to follow up with a customer who has sent an email or made a telephone call for product information.
Also, none of them met customer requests for marketing collateral or application forms despite 38 per cent of the banks researched promised to send the needed documents.
The 14 Indian banks surveyed were part of a global exercise commissioned by IBM and SIEBEL to assess customer experience and sales effectiveness within the world's top 300 retail banks.
The banks in India covered in the survey were ICICI Bank, Citibank, HDFC Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, State Bank of India, ABN Amro Bank, American Express, Andhra Bank, Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, Canara Bank, Corporation Bank, Punjab National Bank and UCO Bank.
Indian banks' counterparts in developed markets like North America and Europe too sail in the same boat. The survey has found that banks across all regions fail to treat phone and email interactions as potential sales opportunities.
Banks lose opportunities to convert customer enquiries into sales, by offering the customer cross-selling recommendations, by merely treating these channels as pure service channels.
Indian banks fared better than their global counterparts in attempting to identify and profile a customer, but fared poorly when it came to understanding customers' needs.
When it came to understanding customer needs on telephone, India lagged Asia Pacific counterparts. Only 13 per cent of banks in India according to the survey made proactive attempts to understand the features the customer was interested in as part of making any product recommendations.
This compared unfavourably with 34 per cent for the Asia Pacific region, with banks in countries like Australia, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong doing much better than the region's average.
Asia Pacific region was better off than Europe, where only 27 per cent of the banks' responses suggested a good understanding of customer needs. The understanding of customer needs in North American region was much better at 54 per cent.
Indian bank customers spend 83 per cent of the call time speaking to a phone-banker, against the Asia-Pacific average of 82 per cent. The average time spent speaking to a phone-banker in North America is 67 per cent and in Europe 74 per cent.
Cross-selling is low across banks in India during customer interaction-while none of the Indian domestic banks attempt to cross/up-sell, Indian foreign banks score higher at 25 per cent.
Detailed findings indicate that whilst there are enormous opportunities to drive improvements in revenue and customer intimacy, Indian banks face many challenges ahead.
Anonymous interactions: 63 per cent of all Indian banks researched are successfully capturing the customer's basic contact details for identification and follow-up purposes.
However, this trend is pronounced only amongst Indian foreign banks of which 100 per cent successfully capture customer contact details compared to a mere 25 per cent of domestic banks.
As much as 87 per cent of all Indian banks researched made no attempt to understand what features the customer was interested in before making product recommendations.
Surprisingly, 25 per cent of Indian domestic banks made a proactive attempt to understand the features the customer was interested in whilst no foreign bank present in India made any such proactive attempts.
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