Differentiating Factors

When large number of companies start selling similar products, it becomes a matter of great fascination as to why people choose the product of Company A rather than companies B or C?

Of course, this is not a new topic and apart from third party analysts and opinion makers, companies themselves elaborately study their own strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis their rivals and then take corrective steps to outshine the competition. The corrective steps could be anything – making packaging more attractive, relaunching the product, introducing its new variants or backing the product up with marketing blitzkrieg!

Now the question arises is what about banks? If we look at the product suite of all the large banks, it will look like a replica of each other with minor variations here and there! Almost all such banks have all the channels of delivery – branch network, self service kiosks, feet on street, mobile app, internet banking, UPI . Schedule of charges and freebies would not look much dissimilar, but for one not very large bank that has made everything free in its zeal to garner larger pie of market share. Earlier new generation private sector banks made a deep impact and weaned significant share from PSBs by extending good customer service. But with self service banking being preferred over a visit to the nearest branch, even service does not seem to be a differentiating factor. What then could be the factors that tilt a customer’s loyalty towards a particular bank.

To my mind, where relationship is given greater importance than sales, courtesy and helpfulness is ingrained in the staff as organisation culture and staff is happy, enthusiastic and pleasantly disposed, such organisations will leave behind those that are solely depending on aggression. Some aggression is required to give impetus to an organisation’s juggernaut to grow faster than market, but while this juggernaut is programmed at the top, it’s execution is at the field level and their inclusion into the organisation’s growth plan is absolutely must.