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We've learned from our work with an insurance company that up to 15% of Tweets received on social media customer service channel are actually not complaints but queries / requests which are one step away from becoming opportunities for upsell and cross-sell. However, since the staff manning the social media customer service channel are typically from the ORM space, they operate with scripts. For them to convert these tweets to sales, they need social intelligence tools that can pick out the proverbial needle from the haystack. Can you cite any success story of a bank / FI / insurer using social media for sales? I'm asking because Avaya, the example you've cited, is not from the BFSI industry and many banks we've spoken to cite regulatory hurdles in doing this.

Great move. Bump just joined the deadpool. For all the hype around mobile payments / wallets, the only mobile banking killer app seems to be Mobile RDC. I predict it will prove a big hit in UK as it has in USA.

@SeevaS:

TY for your comment.

Omnichannel is indeed an industry standard term used to describe spreading out a transaction between multiple channels. 

Establishing a common store of actions occuring across various channels - or multi channel integration - is a prerequisite for omnichannel commerce. But, multichannel is not the same as omnichannel. You can find examples to differentiate between the two in the blog post titled Jumping On The Omnichannel Bandwagon on my personal blog (link not provided per Finextra Community Rules but this post will come up on top of Google search results).

Not to get lost in etymology, but Merriam-Webster defines omni as "universally". ATM and Internet are pre-mobile channels that are on 24/7/365 and qualify as omnipresent without being omnichannel. Researching online on a desktop and buying from an offline brick-and-mortar store - or ROBO as it's called - is one of the earliest examples of omnichannel commerce even though it doesn't involve mobile. (Granted that the more famous term 'showrooming' does involve mobile and is indeed omnichannel). 

Therefore, I don't see any direct link between omnichannel on the one side and omnipresent or mobile on the other.

@LyndsayP: TY for your inputs. 33% reduction in waiting time is indeed a great benefit in itself. I also agree with your point about teller productivity improvement. 

Shazam for Everything? RedLaser Without Barcode?? These popular mobile apps have proved that that impulse purchase works quite well in music, TV shows and books among other things. If US BANK does a good job of "curating" the right category of products and puts together a compelling business model, this could turn out to be a winner. However, it might also face unpleasant questions from its shareholders about why a bank is getting into sales of headphones, songs and TV shows.

Queue buster solutions have been around in grocery stores for a couple of years. In theory, customers pick up a few more items while awaiting their turn at the checkout, thereby increasing the basket size for the retailer. By its very nature, banking doesn't enjoy a similar value proposition. Besides, do kiosks really reduce the overall waiting time? (although they do make the wait more pleasant, thanks to sofas, etc.). 

Plastic has proven its value by not only enduring in cards but by now entering cash. 

According to AdAge, social media yielded just 2% of online holiday retail sales in the USA. For banking products, sales from social media marketing are likely to be even lower. On the other hand, my company's work with service providers across multiple industries shows that 10-15% of messages received on customer support social media channels are actually queries or requests - not complaints - that are just a step away from being opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. More in my Finextra blog post: The Business Case For Social Media Customer Service 

@NeilB + 1. Kudos for bringing up this angle, which I'd completely forgotten about. In all these years of banking with several banks, I can recall several occasions when tellers have helped me out e.g. Increase yield by prematurely closing a fixed deposit and reopening it to take advantage of a recent increase in interest rate; Correct the account number I'd written on the pay in slip while trying to deposit a high-value cheque that favored a different a/c #. I'm sure there must've been an equal # of occasions in which branch managers and relationship managers were involved in a similar capacity but, somehow, I'm only able to remember these bankers in connection with RE-KYC, NetBanking activation and other painful tasks that forced me to visit branches. 

A nod to the belief that cash and sun will be around forever?