Banks Underestimating and Underutilizing Customer Account Statements

Perhaps the most important aspect of bank or finance company statements is that customers frequently open them. While not all consumers read their statements rigorously, they are far more likely to open and read an account statement than they are other pieces of mail received from their bank. At the very least, consumers tend to save their statements - making receipt and retention of the information they contained more assured.

New technologies and techniques designed to enhance the presentation of account-related information have been around for a decade and are gaining ground. According to TowerGroup, as packaged software for statement creation becomes more widely used, both electronic and paper based statements will become increasingly viewed as strategic communications vehicles whose key role is to shape and direct the customer experience. TowerGroup anticipates consumer expectations of how information is presented to them from their bank to continue to increase, as consumers become more familiar with the Web and personalization capabilities available online.

A new TowerGroup report titled, "Bank Account Statements: Underestimated Underutilized, and (Finally!) Undergoing Renewal," by Kathleen Khirallah, Research Director of the Retail Banking Practice at TowerGroup, argues that too many banks are missing key opportunities to proactively manage dialogue with customers - and that paper based account statements have the potential to provide a high degree of personalization in customer communications.

At TowerGroup, Khirallah covers the innovative use of customer data to further improve the overall customer experience. Ms. Khirallah is also available to speak on enterprise-class solutions and their specific applications for customer relationship management (CRM) and business process management (BPM) in the banking industry.