Bain brings its banking customer experience offering to Asia

Bain & Company has launched its proprietary cloud-based insights offering NPS Prism in Southeast Asia.

NPS Prism uses reliable research and analysis methods to track every step of a banking customer experience. The resultant data offers banks an overview of their strengths and weaknesses, and how their customer journey compares with competitors. 

The goal is to help banks prioritise customer interactions that have the highest impact – at a time when experience is matching products and services as a key competitive differentiator. “NPS Prism will help our customers in the region identify the areas where improvements are crucial and will help them provide superior customer experiences,” noted Geqndolyn Lim, a partner at Bain & Company in Singapore. 

NPS Prism was launched by Bain in the US in 2019, based on the firm’s Net Promoter System – a unified metric that gives any business an actionable measure of customer loyalty, complete with recommendations. NPS Prism applies this metric to each step of the banking customer experience 

“The overwhelming response and feedback we’ve heard from companies across the board has been very positive, especially in the banking sector and so we felt that now was the right time to launch in Southeast Asia,” said Lim, who acknowledged the challenging circumstances currently facing the global banking sector. 

Navigating challenges

In addition to vast credit losses and evaporating interest income, the Covid-19 crisis forced banks to reinvent their engagement with customers – primarily through online channels. Despite being relatively resilient, Southeast Asian banks are still navigating unchartered territory.

“The markets in Southeast Asia and our customers have been going through a period of immense change and so have had to evolve their ways of working as a result. NPS Prism will be able to help them gain the deep insights that they need in order to meet these changing expectations and to build customer loyalty,” said Lim.

Beyond customer retention, NPS Prism data will better inform debates around whether to switch entirely to virtual banking – a move that many in the region are considering. Virtual-only competitors are coming up rapidly to challenge the incumbent position in key markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore.

With the FinTech market across the Asia Pacific gaining steam, this challenge is only likely to intensify. NPS Prism and other similar tools are emerging to help banks hold their ground or adapt to this landscape – continually improving their customer experience in the process.