At the end of the day, there are only three channels to customers: Face-to-face, phone or web.

Traditionally financial institutions have done a great job of face-to-face advice with third party advisors, brokers and agents and the branch network.

Phone based is primarily used for existing account enquiries or outbound telesales, and the web is pretty much just informational or account maintenance.

Customers, not surprisingly, have their own preferences for channel. Some customers will only go the face-to-face route, for others the phone is more convenient, but a growing segment wants everything online. My 21 year old, for instance, will never call a call centre – he wants to do everything online.

It’s a new world now – the customer wants to choose their engagement model. If you don’t offer all those channels, they will go somewhere else.