Telstra tells banks to tap technology to capture Gen Y customers

Stuart Corner
Monday, 20 July 2009 14:24

IT Industry - Strategy

"Utilising new technologies to better communicate with customers is going to be a key differentiator for the financial services sector," Caesar said. "The challenge for the industry is having the right framework to deliver customer service through a range of increasingly complex and numerous channels."

She added: "For the banks customer service is a very high priority. Research we did in February shows that across all financial services organisation customer service is their number two priority.

Presence (or real-time status) and location will be critical forms of context information for customer service interactions, the paper says. "By leveraging presence and location information regarding back-of-house staff, customer service staff can instantly find and appropriately engage other staff they need to involve in the interaction. Increasingly, presence and location information exposed by the customer can also be leveraged to help select the best customer service experience to suit them."

To provide the instant response demanded by Gen-Y customers, the report suggests that financial service organisations will need to equip customer service staff with wireless communications to ensure they are always contactable and always able to access needed company information "By equipping customer service staff with the right mobile devices on next generation high-speed wireless networks, and from those, fast access to customer service systems and resources, institutions can ensure that staff can efficiently action the customer's service interaction anywhere, anytime."

Further, it concludes that customer service staff will need to be equipped with collaboration technologies so they can draw on the expertise of others to provide immediate responses to customer queries. "The ability for customer-facing staff to efficiently collaborate with others in the enterprise using pervasive feature-rich real-time collaboration tools directly from their desktop or mobile device offers the potential for service interactions to be completed much more efficiently than has previously been possible for any generation of customer service. Similarly, high quality rich-media, real-time collaboration technologies mean that customers can receive a compelling customer service experience regardless of where the customer service staff helping them are located."

Telstra collaborated with social researcher Hugh Mackay, Roy Morgan Research and the Customer Service Institute of Australia to produce the white paper titled "ICT as a Driver to Improve Service to Generation Y for Financial Services" it is available from www.telstra.com/enterprise.

Rocky Scopelliti, industry marketing executive of financial services at Telstra Enterprise & Government, said: "We saw was an opportunity to bring together social research, customer research and technology research."

Mackay said, "Gen Y is the most highly educated, over-stimulated and media saturated generation in our history. Members of this generation will account for an increasing share of our customer and employee base, so financial institutions will need to understand them intimately and engage with them sensitively,"