CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Can’t stop the feeling Ali Paterson talks trust, relationships and experience with Michael Bielamowicz, Chief Marketing Officer for Glory. No, it’s not marriage guidance – it’s fintech! There’s something very satisfying about listening in to someone else’s conversation. When it’s between two people as passionate about fintech as our editor-in-chief Ali Paterson and Glory’s chief marketing officer Michael Bielamowicz – who is behind some inspired marketing – being a fly on the wall is fascinating. So, sit back and enjoy as the two share candid thoughts about building trust, customer relationships and customer experience in financial services. ALI PATERSON: Everyone loves to talk about blockchain and technology, and artificial intelligence (AI), data and chatbots, and how much it can save, but where does the human element fit in? Do people really want all that? Where is the engagement? I find it interesting that Bitcoin has been around for nine years and has 28.5 million people using it. Whereas it took Twitter just one year to get to 50 million. Doesn’t that tell us something? You need the technology, you need to make the economic argument, but then you also need people buy-in. Michael Bielamowicz: I just came back from The Financial Brand Forum in Las Vegas and, listening to presentations, I heard bank after bank consistently communicating the idea that, as hard as we push technology, we can’t create the experience with technology alone. The experience happens when you introduce the humans. It happens when the interactions start. It’s fascinating how many banks are trying to figure out how to use the digital channel, to create a bit of demand in a place where you can create a human interaction, which then becomes ‘how can we drive that into a really positive experience?’. The older idea of good service being enough isn’t working; it’s not ‘good service’ now, it’s ‘good experience’. It’s the next level of delivery. All the base entry requirement stuff about the immediacy that Millennials – and younger – expect from their
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technology, that’s service. But now it’s about ‘why is it special?’, ‘why is it personal to me?’ and ‘how do you make me feel?’. Everybody’s fast and cheap and convenient, but that’s not differentiating. AP: I saw a fantastic demo of a voice AI that phoned a call centre to verify a change of address, so the customer could avoid having to deal with humans! We must be rapidly approaching the time when AI will be able to deliver that level of trust and experience? MB: It’s really all to do with the difference between a transaction and a relationship. We want transactional stuff to be easy and cheap, and to feel good about the more complicated, relationship stuff. These aren’t incompatible ideas. I shouldn’t have to have a ‘great experience’ if I just want to check my bank account balance but, at some point, I want to know if I’m using my money well, planning for retirement well and being smart? That’s a much more sophisticated and highly personalised decision. I might have a goal of starting a family, or buying a fast car. So, how do I talk to a bot to know what I should do if I have a particular life plan? That’s where we’ve got to come back to ‘who do I trust?’. Nobody goes to a restaurant anymore unless somebody says, ‘oh, yes it’s fabulous’. I read about Amazon’s problem with paid raters – so now you can’t even trust the ratings! Pretty soon, you’re back to ‘I only trust things that I know are true because I know about them personally’. You talked about Bitcoin earlier. And what’s the problem with Bitcoin? Not enough people trust it. They aren’t sure about it or confident in it, so they don’t trade in it. This is the challenge. At some point, you want to look someone in the eye and figure out if you can trust them. If you’re the seller or the bank, you should use the tech to keep your costs down, so you can
redirect the expense to drive revenue and profit. We’re using technology up to the point where we need AI that doesn’t exist today, so at that point you have to substitute it with real intelligence – where, for instance, a person can draw inferences and make connections, so they can really help somebody with financial advice. That’s where we still need the humans. They’re a very powerful addition to the mix. When you can drive that great experience, you see the engagement and sales go up, you see the products per household go up. A lot of that comes from person-to-person stuff. Here’s an interesting data point I heard recently from one of our partners. They had a customer who wanted them to create a marketing campaign around customers choosing their banker – by that I mean choosing any person who works in a branch. So each member of staff created a profile for themselves. So, ‘I’m Mary, I’ve been with the bank seven years, I do this, I love my customers, these are my skills, these are my certifications’ and so on. And the very last thing on the profile of each employee, was ‘these are my hobbies’.
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