ASK THE EXPERT
An integrated communication strategy Rhys Morgan explains why simply knowing your customer is not enough.
T
he crisis of confidence and trust in banking in the post credit crunch world throws up new challenges in the battle for customer loyalty, but it also presents new opportunities to not only keep customers, but increase revenue. If that sounds too good to be true, well it’s not. Other business sectors have been there and done that. It takes vision, it means doing things differently from the way they have always been done and yes, it means some investment, but the ROI is impressive – and compelling. It all starts with how you talk to customers, what you say, how and when you say it and what it tells them about how they are valued. Know Your Customer (KYC) is taken as read. But it is only the start. You must look outside the often cloistered walls of corporate banking and finance and
“Technology has the answer, but it won’t solve the problem unless banks and finance houses are prepared to go half way to meet it” learn from other business sectors who have enjoyed high levels of customer trust and who have had to fight tooth and nail in the face of fierce competition and tight budgets to keep one step ahead of the competition and still grow their businesses. For the successful, the key has been much slicker, includes more specific targeting and much more imaginative customer communications driven by high levels of personalisation instead of the general round robins and quickly binned inserts that were once the staple of direct marketing. Communication is a two-way street, it means offering customers a choice of how, where and when they are addressed and respond accordingly. We live in a multi-channel world; emails, SMS, phone, print, web or any combination need to be harnessed to get the message across. Every reason for contact, however routine needs to be made the most of. At the same time the customer must not get the impression that the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing or that to the banks they are, after all, just a number. Technology has the answer, but it won’t solve the problem unless banks and fi nance houses are prepared to go half way to meet it. Sophisticated current soft ware
frees up organisations from limiting their communications strategy to fit in with what is, or was, technically possible. Instead it inspires them to start from what they would ideally like to be able to do with the knowledge that they can now acquire about their customers. In fact they can achieve it much faster, with less staff, at a lower unit cost and with much, much greater effectiveness than before. It’s rather like the progress of computers, where today’s tiny hand-held devices we all use do more than yesterday’s mainframes, that only backroom boffi ns could understand and operate. In terms of communication, the new solutions mean that instead of IT staff deciding what can be done, personnel throughout an organisation, anywhere in the world, and their service suppliers can collaborate as never before to speedily create, trial and produce a completely integrated communication strategy. Traditional departmental and functional barriers should not be allowed to be barriers to progress. Centralised marketing and sales teams, back and front office, call centres or regional management teams can all be involved in the total customer communication experience with their input and access automatically managed. Around the world fi nancial institutions are putting their toes in the water and trialling this new approach. The results speak for themselves. For the UK’s beleaguered banking sector, the case studies make compulsive reading.
Rhys Morgan, a Chartered Electrical Engineer, joined GMC in 2008 having previously worked for a number of blue chip companies in the industrial engineering sector and laterally enterprise software solutions sector. He managed a number of high profile projects before moving into sales and regional management.
86 www.fsteurope.com
GMC.indd 86
23/07/2010 15:35