Listening Gaps:

1. Lack of In-depth market research

Lack of proper market research is one of the key problems for Bank Asia. Collecting accurate market data
is not taken into account to help prevent over-optimistic forecasts.

2. Keeping an idea unexposed

Most of the employees remain busy doing their appointed work in Bank Asia. They don’t get an
environment where they can discuss, brainstorm and share ideas with management.

3. Not researching the marketplace or potential customers

Bank Asia fell into this trap of inadequate customer research and misinterpreting the marketplace. They
are not data driven focused and don’t follow the trend of customer needs.

4. Not emphasizing on relationship marketing

Bank Asia continuously focuses on getting new customers rather than retaining customers and maintain a
good relationship with them.

5. Delay in fixing an error

Lack of product knowledge, unaligned service intermediaries etc. are some of the reasons that causes
delay in fixing an error.

6. Managers not interacting directly with customers

The marketers, cashiers or customer representatives etc. face the customers directly and they share their
experience with the managers.

7. Unwilling to ask about customer expectations

Manier times, customer expectations are not heard which creates dissatisfaction. If customers do not get
their expected service from the bank, the bank may lose its customers and spread negative WOM.

Reasons for Listening Gap:

Inadequate Customer Research Orientation:

● Insufficient Customer Research: In most cases, Bank Asia believes that marketing research
cannot by itself provide the solution or make the decision and only reveals relevant information to
the marketing managers who can be able to make sound and strategic decision. For this belief the
research remains insufficient.

● Inadequate use of market research: Bank Asia merely collects some statistical facts or
preoccupied with techniques or they communicate the findings in too much vague or technical
language.

Lack of Upward Communication:

 ● Lack of interaction between management and customers: Bank Asia believes that managers
should maintain a professional distance from the customer.

● Insufficient communication between contact employees and managers: Bank Asia rarely
discuss with the frontline employees to know about the customer behavior or expectation.

Insufficient Relationship Focus:

● Focus on transaction rather than relationship: Bank Asia mostly focuses on transactions since
they need to maintain a professional environment in the bank. By knowing what items customers
are buying, they can see exactly what will be their most profitable items to boost transactional
sales. Although it driving traffic and sales, it is inhibiting long-term revenue and profit.

● Focus on new customers rather than relationship customers: Bank Asia continuously lookout
for ways to lure the next potential customer. But getting new customers is becoming expensive
and sales are not increasing because of lack of promotion and relationship marketing.

Inadequate Service Recovery:

● Lack of encouragement to listen to customer complaints: Employees have a lack of

encouragement to listen to customer complaints due to extreme work pressure. Moreover, the
lack of online banking facilities, people come to the bank for getting services. This also causes
delay in providing services.

● No appropriate recovery mechanisms in place for service failures: Inability to control

machinery failures when the bank is closed is one of the problems that Bank Asia has. For not
having an appropriate recovery mechanisms at that time causes negative feelings to the
customers.

Recommendations for improving Listening Gap:

1. Structuring research objectives: As the research objective remain ambiguous for which the
research work does not utilized properly structuring the objectives should be the first do’s that
needs to be prepared. Well-designed research begins with the analysis of available data and
migrates to intentional inquiries with targeted audiences. An examination of current customer
purchase behaviors and product possession will help to identify the need of customer or market
research. Examining the existing relationship data might be required to effectively identify the
best market segments.

2. Excellent complaint handling procedure: To address the customer’s problems, Bank Asia
needs to maintain a well-defined complaint handling procedure. Since there is a lack of
employees in Bank Asia in Main branch, most of the times they don’t feel encouraged to handle
complaints. Therefore, new employees who will be responsible to handle complaints can be a
good option.
3. Emphasizing on empowering employees: Sometimes it is required to react on the spot, which
can be illustrated as prompt response. Customers always a prompt response from the service
providers and for that Bank Asia needs to empower the employees enough to take action or
address any issue promptly.

4. Creating relationship managers and have them report directly to the CEO: They will act as
a traffic cop, directing customers to in-house expertise that meets the customers’ needs. Their job
is to know the customer, the customer’s needs, and the customer’s business and personal
situations, and then meet and exceed those needs. Banks will still have product managers
(manufacturing) and lenders (distribution), but they must all coordinate through the relationship
managers (sales).

5. Setting staff goals and track market share based on customer segments: Setting product
goals incentivizing staff to push products which are a bad fit for the customers is a recipe for
disaster. If each segment utilizes products and services differently, growth and volume will come
from the expansion in number of customers and capture of wallet share.

6. Creating products/offers specific to each segment’s product needs: Since requirements and
demands vary from customer to customer, creating products/offers depending on the particular
segment could be a good option. Similar to other banks, Bank Asia can launch a product related
to women banking.

7. Generating growth by leveraging affinity. Family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances are
great sources of bank not just from staff members, but also board members, service providers and
community leaders. Once a customer segment is chosen, the key is to find the spheres of
influence within that community.
1. I have faced a situation when a customer complained about getting fake notes from the Bank
2. I don’t fell encouraged while listening to customer complaints
3. I always try to provide appropriate recovery in case of service failure of the bank
4. Our bank has the tendency to focus more on new customers rather than maintaining
relationship with existing customers
5. Our bank segments the market thinking of different customer expectations
6. Our bank has too many layers between contact personnel and top management
7. In our bank, there is lack of interaction between management and customers
8. In our bank, there is lack of communication between management and employees
9. Our bank doesn’t research sufficiently to understand the customer expectations and demands
10. I feel the service quality of our bank is good enough compared to other banks
11. Our Bank’s research does not focus on service quality
12. Our bank does not make proper use of market research