The client wanted to be positioned as an expert in Islamic Banking and understand Islamic card users preferences in order to develop relevant CVPs.

The research included a first level of understanding through a qualitative research, followed by a quantitative study, to help the client develop an in depth understanding of Islamic credit card users, their needs, levels of familiarity with Islamic banking and its principles/models, and what differentiate them from conventional credit card users.

Design: interviews among users of Islamic and non-Islamic credit users, deep dive by Mass vs. Affluent customers.

The research helped the client to build up its understanding of Islamic banking and Islamic credit card users. The insights were used to initiate discussions with their clients and key opinion leaders / scholars with the perspective of creative new innovative Islamic financial products.

Insights around consumer attitudes, behavior towards online shopping, online payments, and card security perceptions.

Quantitative online research among online shoppers and users of new payment methods such as digital wallets, contactless cards, QR payments.

The research helped the client gather data and general content related to ecommerce, online payments and new payment methods security aspects, ahead of the Card Security Week. The insights were used by the client’s PR agency as a critical input to develop infographics and press releases.

This UAE bank recognizes the importance of understanding customer needs and to improve services. The final aim for the bank is to deliver best in class customer experience.

In the pursuit of this goal, the bank implemented a research program that seeks to evaluate customer experience immediately after different interactions/transactions their customers have with the bank. This program involved the execution of focused surveys to understand the different experiences and Moments of truth along the Customer Journey with the bank.

The typical customer cycle involves first the onboarding/welcome call of a customer, then, customers start interacting with the bank through different channels performing specific transactions. As the relationship continues, customers might experience some issues and therefore contact the bank to complain or deal with service query. Finally, the customer can become inactive and might end the relationship with the bank.

All these situations represent moments of truth in the relationship between the bank and its customers, therefore it requires that the bank follows strict procedures that can lead to enhance customer experience and consequently ensure customer satisfaction. This is a continuous research program.

“Moment of Truth” are interactions that can cause a significant impact on the attitude of the customer to the bank. Highly satisfied customers are more loyal and are more likely to purchase and refer to the bank. Within the universe of customer interactions, the bank believes that core Moments of truth include both relationship maintenance and diagnosing the on-going transactions & interactions with the bank.

The bank seeks to address the different ‘moments of truth’ within the customer journey either by focusing on process improvements or behavioral change. These evaluative measures and diagnostic understand are part of the KPI (key performance scores) of the different stakeholders and linked with their strategic goals and performance evaluation.

This UAE bank recognizes the importance of understanding customer needs and to improve services. The final aim for the bank is to deliver best in class customer experience.

In the pursuit of this goal, the bank implemented a research program that seeks to evaluate customer experience immediately after different interactions/transactions their customers have with the bank. This program involved the execution of focused surveys to understand the different experiences and Moments of truth along the Customer Journey with the bank.

Voice of Customer is a program that analyzes different aspects of client relationship with the bank across different channels and segments to compare it with the peer group (competitive benchmarking). The overall objective of the project is to measure and understand client engagement.

The research also helped measure customer engagement through satisfaction, willingness to continue/loyalty and recommendation as well as understand the reasons/diagnostics for the brand performance in a competitive context.

The research also helped understand the strengths and weaknesses of the pillars (product, service, brand, pricing), and understand their contribution on customer engagement, thus identifying areas to fix in terms of customer expectations and competitive gap.

The research is being conducted annually since 2014, through telephonic interviews with the bank customers as well as competition customers. The research is conducted covering different banking segments – Retail Banking, Retail Islamic Banking, Business Banking, Commercial Banking and Corporate Banking.

Highly satisfied customers are more loyal, more likely to purchase and refer to bank. This research helps the bank, measure their customer’s satisfaction with them as well as their likelihood to recommend the bank to their friends, colleagues and relations, i.e. assess the strength of bank advocacy. This measurement has a competitive context so the bank’s performance is benchmarked against their peers.

The study is able to provide the bank, areas where they are doing well as well as areas to improve/work-on to enhance their customer engagement. This strategic understanding helps the bank plan for the strategic goals based on which different channels, products, touchpoints stakeholders are evaluated.