Use the phone rather than e-mail to call your bank because the telephone is still the preferred medium to resolve basic queries, says a survey of leading Indian retail banks by Siebel Systems and IBM.

Compared to a near 100 per cent resolution over telephone, e-mail lags behind with as many as 43 per cent of the Indian banks surveyed never responding to e-mail.

Closure of sale and lead-generation are dismal across both telephone and e-mail as both are seen as no more than a service channel, says the survey.

Commissioned by Siebel and IBM, the survey evaluated top 100 retail banks across India, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. The India leg of the survey covered 10 national banks and four foreign banks.

According to the results of the survey, India's leading retail banks, much like their counterparts in the Asia-Pacific, are leveraging their customer interactions to build customer loyalty, increase products per customer, and maximise revenues.

However, cross-selling is low across banks in the region. None of the Indian domestic banks surveyed attempted to cross or up sell. Indian foreign banks scored higher at 25 per cent in this area.

No Indian bank -- foreign or domestic -- made a proactive attempt to follow up with the customer after an initial telephone/e-mail interaction.

Indian banks did fare better than their Asian counterparts in attempting to identify and profile the customer, but they fared poorly when it came to understanding the customers' needs.

"While the last phase of industry growth was largely driven by mergers and acquisitions, the next growth opportunity for retail banks will come from achieving customer differentiation. Retail banks can no longer afford to passively wait for customers to walk into their branches. Nor can they afford to treat all customers the same, or in a manner which compromises their experience," says Dan Bognar, Director of Customer Strategy, Asia-Pacific & Japan, Siebel Systems.

While the findings indicated that banks have enormous opportunities to drive improvements in revenue and customer intimacy they face many challenges.

Anonymous interactions: Sixty-three per cent of all Indian banks surveyed are successfully capturing the customer's basic contact details for identification and follow-up purposes.

However, this trend is pronounced only amongst Indian foreign banks, all of whom surveyed successfully captured customer contact details compared to a mere 25 per cent of domestic banks.

Missed opportunities: Eighty-seven per cent of all Indian banks surveyed made no attempt to cross or up-sell related banking products during the course of customer interaction.

Poor customer experience: Forty-three per cent of all Indian banks surveyed failed to respond to customer e-mail inquiries.

Poor conversion rates: Eighty-seven per cent of all Indian banks researched made no attempt to understand what features the customer was interested in before making product recommendations.

Surprisingly, 25 per cent of Indian domestic banks did make a proactive attempt to understand the features the customer was interested in, whilst no Indian foreign banks made any such proactive attempts.

Poor follow-up and closure: While 38 per cent of all Indian banks offered to send customer-related marketing collateral, none of the banks successfully fulfilled the customer's request.

"This necessitates developing a best-practice approach to sales processes and employing the right technology to identify and uniquely profile the customer, understand their needs, recommend solutions of value, and manage each interaction as a lead through to conversion. Banking executives who are able to take quick and effective action to address these challenges will stand to reap significant financial benefits to take them through the next phase of growth," says Bognar.