Conducting focus groups can be a great way to learn what your audience thinks of your customer service, products and customer journey for those products. By using this research tool, you will be able to improve your banking experience and stand out from the competition by gaining insight directly from consumers. Let’s review what you can learn from focus groups that can help your bank.
Learn How to Improve Your Customer Process
For this example, we’ll use mortgage loans. If your bank can provide the best customer experience during the mortgage loan process, customers will share to everyone what a great journey they had with you. By using focus groups, you can learn where your process and the process of other banks have gone wrong and where they have excelled.
The insights you gain from a focus group can cause you to see the mortgage process differently. Maybe consumers don’t like how cut and dry it can be, or they hated how long it took for their loan officer to reply to their email. On the other hand, maybe they love when the loan officer is extremely proactive and hands on, or they like when the loan officer is following up and calling them to make sure everything is okay. These are some basic examples of the information you could get from focus groups, but the truth is, you might hear something you’ve never thought of before and it could be extremely eye opening.
Learn How to Keep Employees Motivated
If your employees aren’t performing as you’d expect them to be, conducting a focus group with an objective moderator might be a great option. Here you’ll gain insight into their needs, wants, and perception. Not only will this engage your employees, but they’ll also feel like their employer cares about what they think and feel. An employee focus group, removes the guesswork when trying to decide why they aren’t performing to the level that you expected.
Learn What Your Customers Want
Conducting focus groups your customers and competitors’ customers will help you learn what your bank needs to do differently in order to keep your current customers happy and refer you while also standing out from the competition. Who knows, maybe you will discover a blue ocean that your bank can sail into.
Focus groups isn’t always the catch all for your researching needs. You might need to use other research tools along with the focus groups to obtain the information you need. While it may seem a bit overwhelming at first, it will be worth it because of the amount of rich information you will receive that can’t be found from surveys. The insight you’ll gain will help your bank grow its brand and improve their customer experience in the long term.
