No company can thrive without quality people at all levels. What does evolve is the skills base. As the financial services sector increasingly focuses on developing and sustaining enduring and profitable relationships, the coming years are likely to see an ever greater need for customer-facing capabilities. Other key requirements include people with the data analytical expertise needed to profile clients’ changing product demands and service expectations.
The quality of customer-facing staff is especially critical in fostering loyalty, developing opportunities for cross-selling and managing complaints that could damage client satisfaction. Yet
Winning the battle for growth: Building the customer-centric financial institution, a survey of more than 250 financial services executives carried out in 2006, found that less than 30% of respondents believe their staff are fully ‘engaged and enabled’ to deal with customers ‘efficiently and effectively’. It is particularly noticeable that staff are more likely be rewarded on the basis of short-term financial performance rather than customer-related metrics such as client satisfaction and retention.
Many respondents in the survey appreciate the growing importance of human capital, with improving the quality of people in customer-facing roles seen as second only to improved IT on their list of priorities. Many also recognise the potential barriers. ‘Talent retention’ and ‘culture and resistance to change’ were seen as the biggest inhibitors to improving human capital performance. However, few appear to be following up these stated priorities. For example, organisations were far more likely to be investing most effort into ‘training on products and services’ rather than ‘employee engagement’ or ‘behavioural change programmes on attitudes to customers'.
How PwC is assisting financial services organisations
PricewaterhouseCoopers can help financial institutions to develop effective human capital strategies capable of improving customer focus and delivering revenue growth. This includes helping organisations to make the most effective investment in people, develop customer-centric rewards strategies and integrate their approach to human resources.
Organisations operating in today’s world are facing some of the greatest people management challenges in the history of business. But how will these challenges impact businesses over the next decade?
Managing tomorrow’s people: the future of work in 2020, is a report developed by PricewaterhouseCoopers Human Resource Services practice hypothesising the future of people management and the issues that might arise in 2020. The report uses scenarios methodology and documents three possible worlds of the future. Each world is examined from a business context along with the potential people management issues that might arise. It also contains results from a global survey of 3,000 ‘millennials’ from the US, China and the UK who represent a generation just joining the workforce, to test their views and expectations on the future of work.
