SPSS - Customers

Barclays Bank

Situation

In October 1998, Barclays Bank, a leading U.K. financial services group, became the first organization outside the market research industry to use QTS (Quancept Telephony System) in a call center*. The 36 QTS interviewing stations have enabled the U.K. Personal Market Research Team at Barclays to field surveys more efficiently and, consequently, gain more value from data when researching customer needs.

“The whole ethos of the company is geared towards understanding and satisfying the needs of customers. We can’t afford to guess what customers are thinking,” says Robert Jacob, market research information systems manager at Barclays Bank.

Challenge

One of Barclays’ main objectives is to serve customers by understanding them as individuals, offering services and products that anticipate and satisfy their requirements. Jacob explains, “We must continue to understand, in detail, what customers require. The financial services market is ever more competitive and it is becoming easier for others to deliver financial services, especially during this time of swift technological change with the seamless integration of the Internet, digital TV, and teletext. It is important to differentiate our market research and keep a finger on the customer’s pulse.”

Solution

Jacob states that one of the most useful features of QTS is its ability to digitally record verbatim responses. This allows managers to listen to the recordings at their desk and use them to add impact to presentations, or place them on the intranet as digital sound bites. “The voice of the customer really is very powerful. It goes far beyond transcripts,” adds Jacob. Barclays can gauge much more about people’s feelings towards a particular product or service by the tone of their voice. Jacob reports that Barclays experimented with recording verbatim on cassette tapes, but it proved manually intensive to sift through the recordings. “QTS gives us the capability to capture verbatim replies and play them filtered by selected criteria, such as sex, age, and employment type.”

Jacob is planning for a time when the results of a survey will be automatically published on the Barclays intranet along with sound files to allow people to instantly access any relevant information.

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