Alignment of Web Sites to Customer Processes - Study in the Banking Industry

Banks continually claim to supply customer-orientated services. However, banking services are still focused on purely delivering financial products. Customers will usually receive financial products but often no specific solution to their true problem. In that way, customers’ perception of banking services is often far from satisfaction. In addition, important targets of marketing strategy (e.g., customer loyalty, crossand upselling) do not get achieved. Therefore, the consistent alignment of financial services to customer processes becomes increasingly important and will significantly enhance the competitiveness of banks. This paper investigates the extent of customer support provided by banks with respect to the customers’ problem solving process. The study focuses on the Internet as one of several customer interfaces within a multichannel approach. The paper delivers the theoretical framework of customer processes and provides an empirical identification of customer processes. The main part of the study is represented by the evaluation of 100 Web sites of banks. As a result, the paper reveals that most of the analyzed Web sites fail to assist customers within their processes. However, the idea of supporting customer processes is spreading. It will become a major challenge to transform the banks’ traditional product-driven view into a consequent customer-driven approach.