CUSTOMER’S VIEW
Real time
How easily can your customers contact
the right person in your bank?
BANK CUSTOMER DANE INGS runs an Internet marketing consultancy, Ever.co.za. He gets a lot of mail, some of it very unwelcome.
‘What happened was that I got a fake e-mail, a phishing scam. I get
quite a few that resemble the FNB website and on that day I thought
‘I’m really tired of this. I wish I could do something about it’. I wanted
to actively help the bank to catch these individuals.’
Many of us have had the same impulse. It’s community-spirited,
and the community in this case is the bank and its customers. That’s
how banks would like their customers to think of them, so there are
two opportunities here: to get real-time information on phishing, and
to build a closer relationship with a client.
Three opportunities, really. It’s also a chance to alienate a customer
by making him do the work, and Dane was well aware of that risk.
‘Then I thought – okay, where do I get the right contact details, and
how long is that going to take me? I’ve got to go to the website, find
the right contact, then sit on the phone for who knows how long
listening to music, and eventually get through to someone who’ll refer
me to someone else.’ Dane played that out