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Category: Offline customer engagement

Find the truth about your Customers, yourself!

Posted on by Clari5

In an age where even scientific discoveries are turning out to be unreliable, scientists, of course state that these are “self correcting” and therefore in the long run, the truth shall prevail, businesses have something to worry about, mainly so because they need to take quick decisions based on the information they have available today and cannot wait till a more “accurate” version of the truth arrives tomorrow. To take a parallel in the medicine industry, many times wrong diagnosis has harmed businesses more than wrong strategy.

Here are a few reasons why research goes wrong in today’s world:

  • An interconnected world allows access to analysis in one part of the world, everywhere else. However conditions and assumptions underlying the analysis may not apply to your case

  • Hype about new media, like Facebook, Twitter and Mobile forces advertisers and marketers to embrace these channels so that they can brag about the logos. However, the ROI for the same may not justify the effort depending on how frequently decision makers in your segment access these channels

  • More data, more complexity – news gatherers try to hide the complexity of findings and analyses in simple terms, so that content is easy to read and generates more page views. However, only getting to the source of the content would tell the reader about the constraints and assumptions as well as the statistical probabilities observed

  • Terminology – different terms mean different things in the same language with the same industry. For example, a “savings account” could mean an fixed term deposit in the UK, whereas it means an interest earning demand deposit in India. An analyst reading about trends in savings accounts could make wrong interpretations owing to this

In summary, either

  • the third party research does not mean what you think it does, or

  • it isn’t relevant in your context, or

  • it works – and if it does, it’s more likely a fluke that’s not guaranteed to provide repeatable results

The solution?

  • do your own research

  • implement strategy based on this research

  • implement a feedback loop that proves / disproves your hypothesis

  • rinse and repeat

In the banking industry, it is more important than ever to not rely on trends, news sources and so called “independent” studies that are not validated for your customers, your business environment and your products based on your own data.

If you are a leading bank, you already have a huge amount of transaction data ready to be mined in real time. To find out how you can perform your own research to retain valued customers and maximize revenue, contact CustomerXPs at clari5@customerxps.com.

By Alok Kumar

Alok Kumar is Product Line Engineering Manager at CustomerXPs

He can be reached at clari5@customerxps.com

CustomerXPs offers real-time, intelligent products that empower banks with instant insights enabling influenced outcomes of deeper customer engagement and fraud-free transactions.

Five ways Banks can ensure annus horribilis for Customer Experience in 2014!

Posted on by Clari5

1. Offer to downgrade:  Banks can bombard the best customers with offers to downgrade their status. For example, they can get the relationship manager to call the platinum card holder and offer her to issue a silver credit card.

2. Cross sell irrelevant products: Its relatively easy doing this.  Run the algorithm on a customer relationship and identify the least fit product. The teller can than try to cross sell it to the unsuspecting customer. A new low can be achieved by wrong-timing the pitch. Example:  Offer a car loan at a cheaper rate to customer who purchased car last week.

3. Antipathetic complaint redressal mechanism:  There are more than one ways to do it. Make customers jump through hoops to reach the customer care executives.  Refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists. Get customers to start over every time they want to check the status. Cross sell irrelevant products when the customers call to complain.

4. Commoditize the customer:  Converting the customer from individual to a commodity has monopoly rule at the pinnacle of horrible customer experience.  One sentence that really does the trick is,” we deal with hundreds of customer like you.”

5. Continue with antiquated processes: After all, old is gold. Continuation with antiquated processes will ensure that customers have to fill forms in triplicate and visit multiple counters for each transaction. Then cross sell irrelevant products to them.

From the days when customer experience management was more titular than operational, today its closely correlates with lower customer attrition and better financial results for the banks.  Hopefully, the banks will endeavor to avoid the above 5 mistakes thus achieving superior results.

By Ratnesh Pandey

Ratnesh is Head of Marketing at CustomerXPs.

He can be reached at clari5@customerxps.com

CustomerXPs offers real-time, intelligent products that empower banks with instant insights enabling influenced outcomes of deeper customer engagement and fraud-free transactions.