Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 7: Entrenching Committed Customers through the ELATEd Customer Experience

Touchpoint Marketing: Entrenching Committed Customers through the ELATEd Customer Experience

This is the conclusive part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third, fourth , fifth and sixth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

 

Track

Know You Customer, and not just his finances!

Entrench

Multiply favorable customer experiences

Having now taken the entire long and committed route of Engaging, Linking-Up, Addressing and Tracking your customers across Touchpoints, it is but obvious for you to leverage the wealth of experience and more importantly the data collected along the way. It’s here that the magic of Predictive Analytics and paves way for you to replicate and multiply your Touchpoint success.

There could be an entire battery of profitable business strategies through hawk-eye and creative data mining and advanced analytics (on your Touchpoint data) -

• Increase sales by understanding and acting  on buying patterns.
• Increase the ROI from customer relationship management by targeting the right offer, to the right customers, at the right time.
• Build profitable new business models, like subscriptions for digital content.
• Reduce churn and boost retention with data-driven strategies to maximize profit.

Predictive analytics solutions could help companies solve a range of business problems, such as:

Acquisition:  Who is most likely to subscribe in the next week?

Churn and attrition:  How likely is this customer to leave us in the next 30 days?

Segmentation and pricing:  Will this segment buy more if we lower the price?

Relationship management:  Should we assign a dedicated sales rep or sell to this customer from a contact center?

Leverage your social media presence to meet key business objectives and drive customer advocacy

• Adapt your marketing and sales strategies to the evolving landscape of social business
• Develop metrics to benchmark your efforts and guide content strategy
• Multiply favorable customer experiences through a much larger base of general Twitter and Facebook users, as well as through third-party user community websites.

Conclusion

To sum it up, Touchpoint Marketing is no revolutionary concept or yet another marketing jargon to herald a new phenomenon in today’s hyperactive times. In fact, it’s the return to good old concept of ‘Customer is King’ and trying to bring him back, right in the centre of marketing ecosystem. Every day, every moment multiple brands are touching him through multiple Touchpoints. But how many of them are really touching him? And how many are merely just another channel of grabbing his already spread too thin attention?

 

Touchpoint Marketing intends to develop a focused 360-degree plan that ELATEs this customer by -

·         Mapping the customer experience lifecycle across Touchpoints.

·         Build a holistic customer experience strategy by integrating social media with internal customer data and syndicated sources.

·         Develop a strategic plan and tactical blueprint to prioritize and act on insights.

·         Apply predictive analytics to social media findings to drive marketing opportunities.

·         Engage him, Link up his experiences, Address his concerns, Track his journey and Entrench him…or rather get our Brands entrenched to his ecosystem!

Its time, the organizations adapt to Touchpoint Marketing and keep in touch with their dynamically changing, highly aware and aggressively seduced customers.  It’s time, we actually Touch our customers, the Touchpoint Marketing way!

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 6: Tracking the Customer Journey

Touchpoint Marketing: Tracking the Customer Journey through the ELATE framework

This is the sixth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third, fourth and fifth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

  

Track

Know You Customer, and not just his finances!

Many marketers launch, manage and measure marketing efforts in silos or “swim lanes”: “I sent out X mailers, and got Y response/results.” Those results are measured against other direct mail campaigns, but never truly correlated with parallel marketing efforts across other channels; at best, a senior manager may review the overall results and make rough calculations. Like swimmers, marketers are furiously paddling with their heads down in their own lanes.

Touchpoint Marketing is all about looking at the powerful new “holistic models” that look and measure activities across all of the swim lanes. Or rather, how are all the Touchpoints collectively Linking into the ‘Customer Experience’ scheme of things.

Brands need to invest in complete holistic views of their customer ecosystem. Swim lanes and piecemeal marketing approaches will no longer work as companies demand more program accountability and results. But this is only part of a much broader drive for a complete holistic view of the customer ecosystem. Many factors affect marketing, such as distribution, sales calls, and innovation to just name three. Strong performance in these areas will naturally help your marketing efforts. Your brand overall has an enormous impact on your marketing (Apple is a premier example). Yet companies have done a poor job in calculating these as part of their marketing model. This needs to witness a complete and rapid overhaul. Companies should increasingly be able to identify these key drivers and allocate funds accordingly. They should be able to evaluate exactly how much affect customer service, for one, has on marketing success. If it’s large, they might decide to allocate funds now being funneled into marketing programs, into the customer experience and drive new business with existing customers. 

Increase new customer acquisition by leveraging social media to increase awareness and educate consumers about the brand.

We could also call this the “big pool” approach. Like Brand health tracking surveys, the approach intends to put money to our‘Customer-centric’ claims by virtue of Customer Health Tracks. With their eye on the total pool or picture, marketers will have a better grasp on which activities (across Touchpoints) are contributing the most, which are killing my customers and how they interrelate.

This will allow them to shift (and better target) budgets as needed, effectively directing funds to Touchpoints so that all are contributing more equally, and not a single of them are eroding my Brand persona.

Diligent tracking and churning of Social Media Customer Insights will always add to this picture -

• Who is engaging with your brand? (Social media influencers)
• What are they saying about you? (Top themes, emerging issues)
• Why are they interacting with your company? (Value propositions from the customer’s point of view)

To know more, continue reading the conclusive part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 5: First Listen to your Customer, before even claiming to Delight him

Touchpoint Marketing: First Listen to your Customer, before even claiming to Delight him

This is the fifth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second, third and fourth parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

Address

Improve retention by understanding and providing actionable insights about service breaks as they occur

It takes just one tenth of a marketing spend efforts to retain an existing company, right? So it’s time that organizations start growing this ‘easier to market’ share of current customers by understanding how to optimally increase customer engagement across Touchpoints. Be it via social media, direct mailers or one-to-one conversations, customer engagement needs to essentially start with “Your Issues first!” approach.

No customer wants to be sold ‘personalized equity advices’ when he is losing his cool on a mis-sold plan. It’s a marketing faux pas to be selling ULIPs to a customer who is well researched and is insisting on Traditional Life Plans.

One of the most important pieces of the customer ecosystem jigsaw is listening to the Voice of the Customer. You attract him, get him in the door, Engage him, Link-up with him, sign him on….and then move on to acquiring another customer?  Close of sale is not the end of it. It’s infact the beginning of a new relationship and that’s precisely where most of our marketing muscle should be focused on. Yes, in strict functional terms, customer concerns should sit under Operations, under Quality. However, it’s essential for Marketing to participate in these initiatives. If Marketing is the biggest stakeholder of costly Market Research exercises (studying attitudes and preferences of potential customers), why shouldn’t they be keen to hear the voices from their home turf as well? The attitudes, preferences and concerns of existing customers in their own backyard? As it goes, Get your House in order First!

 Listen to your heartbeat (existing customers) and Address them with a sense of urgency -

• Improve the experience across the customer lifecycle and all touch points including online, in-store, mobile, social, and phone
• Enhance product and service positioning with actionable insights from both surveys and unstructured feedback
• Make loyalty and rewards programs more effective using customer preferences
• Act on customer feedback to increase first-time sales, repeat business, and brand advocacy
• Improve customer satisfaction and barriers to sales at key points across the customer lifecycle
• PR and the public social media universe will play a big role in addressing existing customers. Companies should be prepared to manage consumer response, both on other social media sites and channels outside of social media.
• Get head-on into Customer experience management. Build a Voice of the Customer strategy aligned with your key business goals.

Collect

• Document customer interactions across segments and lifecycle stages (customer journey mapping).
• Gain early insights on service breaks, emerging issues, customer sentiments and needs through all traditional and social Touchpoints.
• Try to understand local, regional, and national feedback about your competition
• Adapt to Text analytics and go about uncovering valuable insights. Create an infrastructure to analyze surveys, transactions, customer feedback, and other VOC data.

Analyze

• Analyze customer data by product, life cycle stage, line of business, and channel. Classify customer comments with strategic business context to increase relevance.
• Analyze root causes to identify pain points that dissatisfy customers. Prioritize the factors that impact customer retention and loyalty.
• Text analytics can be deployed to solve complex business challenges. Text mining enables you to unlock the value from surveys, call center notes, email, social media feedback, help desk tickets, and other sources of unstructured text data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) based analytic tools automatically capture the main ideas from customer comments. To identify key issues, a classification engine can sift through millions of documents to track the main ideas.

Action

• Showcase findings by exploring emerging issues, top themes, customer sentiment, and more.
• Provide channels for brand advocates to recommend your services.
• Deliver consistent and improved customer communications.
• Train your team to interpret VOC results and take action.

To know more, continue reading the sixth part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 4: Introducing the Touchpoint Marketing ELATE Framework

Introducing the Touchpoint Marketing ELATE Framework

This is the fourth part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first, second and third parts to know more about the thought process that has led to this ELATE Framework

Touchpoint Marketing is all about having a disciplined, focused and passionate 5-point strategy abbreviated as the E.L.A.T.E. strategy. And what better abbreviation? Eventually, beyond all the 4Ps and 5Cs of Marketing, isn’t it all about ELATE-ing the only C that really matters? – the Customer!

Here’s finally unlocking the manuscript of this tightly inter-locked Touchpoint Marketing strategy of ELATE.

Engage

Through your unique Brand Personality

Ensure that all the customer Touchpoints right from your service kiosks, bank counters, relationship managers, showroom sales staff, delivery staff to your helpdesks, website, ATMs, after sales, customer service execs and complaint & grievance cells  are talking to same language.  All your brand imagery and messaging needs to be deeply entrenched across your Touchpoints. It needs to come across strongly in not just your communication, but more importantly in the customer interactions. Imagery is not just a wish or attitude of how you want your brand to be perceived by a customer. Imagery, Brand personality, Positioning are essentially more based out of your Touchpoint interactions. In simple words, your Brand personification is not a wonderfully woven Outside-In concept from your media agencies. It is infact, a steadily built Inside-Out effort reflecting the DNA and culture of your organization.

In India, MCdonalds is practicing it very consistently. Run across any of their stores and you’ll come across very similar standards of service. Cheery interiors, further enhanced by a happy, helpful and peppy staff. Others like Domino’s and Pizza Hut too are achieving this with a good degree of success. These food joints have realized the power of such Touchpoints and are certainly investing a lot in training and ingraining the Organization culture to these multiple ‘faces of the company’.

To add, over and beyond the traditional Touchpoints, companies need a distinct strategy to keep the Social Media Touchpoints pretty engaging as well. With its unique features, social media offers new opportunities for increasing transactions and gaining new customers through promotions and rewards programs. Infact, the level of engagement and dynamism generated from this media could be a key differentiator for many businesses –

• Design your marketing programs to exploit features unique to social media. Social media provides cost efficient, highly leveraged, and unique engagement opportunities (e.g., social networks, viral advocacy, one-click transactions, check-in/location services, scalability, etc.).
• Make it more engaging through platform strategy, content strategy, marketing and promotions, social  and mobile apps
• Identify and engage social media influencers. Convert them to brand advocates. Increase engagement to boost customer acquisition. Figure out innovative strategies to monetize your Social Media pull. Strategies to convert cute Likes to committed Love!

Link

One Brand, One Customer, One Experience

As indicated earlier, how often have you been pushed around by multiple departments in a company? How often have you felt lost in the complex web of organization structure? How often have you felt dealing with two completely different companies before sales and after sales (Mahindra Holidays, ICICI)? or during Business development pitches and final outcomes (various Outsourcing consulting firms with BD-transitions-Operations/delivery structures)?

Ask any existing Maruti car owner and he’ll vouch for its after sales service (ASS).  Yes, the company makes great value cars – aggressively priced, packed with features and fuel-efficient. But at the same time, a major component of Maruti’s success is its wide ASS. It’s not just an attitude reflected in its advertising (finding a Maruti service station in the nowhere of Ladakh mountains). It is a well-established fact that its customers feel delighted about. The wide ASS network and easy availability of cheap spares completes the One Experience picture for Maruti. All the afore-mentioned factors providing good resale value for Maruti cars and thus further enhancing its appeal. It’s a wonderful way of providing value right from Sales to After Sales to Resale (Maruti True Value) to Upgrade. The complete journey of a Maruti customer from his Alto to SX4 to Grand Vitara. Wonder why they haven’t used such a convincing script in their advertising? Zindagi ka Paiyyah, Meri Maruti! (driving the wheels of life, My Maruti!)

Touchpoint Marketing is about Linking up all your brand Touchpoints to a uniformly satisfying Customer Experience story. Needless to say, it’s essential to Link-in your social media strategy as well by creating a seamless user experience that drives conversion. Capturing, analyzing, and acting upon customer input in the various stages of the “conversion funnel” is key to reaching your objectives. Allow a good amount of tailoring of your social media promotions for various target segments. Allow them to create their own communities thus further enhancing the appeal of such programs.

To know more, continue reading the fifth part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 3: The Moments of Truth that define Great Brands, Great Companies

The Moments of Truth that define Great Brands, Great Companies

This is the third part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Do catch up on the first and the second part of this series to build more context about this piece.

Knowing the characteristics of your customers can help to clarify and identify potential leads. Yes, it’s right that 20% of your existing customers are bringing in 80% of your revenues. But choose to ignore the other 80% at your own risk. Customers change. Their incomes, attitudes, preferences, life stages evolve at a much faster pace than our ability to garner insights. We could be sitting on potential blockbuster, currently dormant customers. It would be naïve and myopic to not acknowledge the unique, niche segments within your customer clusters. All it takes is a bit of a nudge and push to activate them. They may be too miniscule in terms of their segment size, but may still have the potential to emerge as your most entrenched customers. But yes, it definitely takes some deep-dive understanding about these customers to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

It’s time that companies wake up to the power of these niches and start looking at these smaller segments for their unique characteristics. It’s time to stop looking at customers as one large mass that’ll react similarly to mass marketing ‘pulls’. Somewhere, we need to go beyond the existing lazy segmentation of key accounts, high net worth (HNWs) and the rest.  Marketing to this ‘Rest’ could be a real game-changer! If marketers put concentrated marketing efforts toward knowing about these high-potential niche customer segments, they're going to do a whole lot better than if they go after everybody in a similar manner.

Now is the time to use the knowledge of your CRM systems and Data Warehouses for clarity and better decisions. For quicker, agile and more targeted offers/mailers. If there is newly discovered information that you should be capturing in your CRM system, now is the time to add the additional fields into your adaptable CRM system.  

Going ahead with a multi-media campaign that claims “Hum Rishtey samajhte hain” and not caring for your existing ‘Rishteys’ doesn’t really add up. It’s great to be gloating about your social media success through the sheer no. of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page. But is there any metric that tracks the sheer no. of ‘dislikes’ for your customer service? High-pitched above-the-line media campaigns bring immediate, far-reaching success (or so you think), but it are consistent below-the-line, Touchpoint-based, one-to-one efforts, the make you the revered organization you always wanted to be.

Multiple customer service roles were introduced to bring your product/service closer to the customer. To help him, to advise him, to guide him, hand-hold him and lead him to this best interests. Excellent, ideal concepts to begin with. But somewhere along the way, all these additional roles are simply adding to your brand clutter. These numerous ‘faces’ of your brand (with no real brand ownership) could be steadily eroding into and diluting your core proposition.

It’s time Organizations de-clutter themselves and get out of the complex web of Organizational structures. It’s time customer-centric finally places the customer at the centre (rather than pushing him across the organization centers). Your customers are not just a part of a fancily-labeled segment (Young achievers, late bloomers, mid-life identity seekers), each one is a distinct individual. Each one is interacting with multiple Touchpoints of your company on a regular basis. It’s time each such Touchpoint starts being the essence of your brand characteristics. The features and attributes that you’ve been so aggressively marketing through your ATL campaigns, finally boil down to a few moments of truth. The moment a potential customer finally comes face to face with your brand.

Touchpoint Marketing is all about leveraging the potential of these moments. By no way is this revolutionary concept. CRM, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Point of Sale (POS), merchandising…companies have been practicing these concepts for a long time. It’s just that we need a consolidated fresh-look at all these initiatives from a ‘One Customer’ perspective. We need a strong culture that enforces the belief of ‘One Customer’ who deals with multiple Touchpoints in our organization. Rather than multiple Touchpoints catering to multiple customer segments, with no dialogue between each of such Touchpoints.

The idea of Touchpoint Marketing may infact find much resonance in John Carlzon’s definitive work in ‘Moments of Truth’ way back in 1987.

As famously emphasized by John Carlzon - A company is defined in the minds of its customers as the composite total of every moment of truth -- those short periods when the customer interacts with the company or one of its employees. The best approach to delivering consistently high-quality moments of truth lie in building a customer-driven company. The essential characteristics of such a company being –  

• The employees who interact with customers have the authority to make decisions on behalf of the company.
• Middle managers who work to manage resources so the frontline employees can be more effective.
• Corporate leaders who develop a vision of where the company should be heading and provide inspiration.
• A flat organizational structure where real-world experience from frontline employees is learned from and built upon.
• A willingness to look at everything solely and exclusively from the same perspective a customer uses.
• A commitment to narrowing the focus of the company to the delivery of exceptional service.

 

Bring all of those elements together and a customer-driven company can achieve some very significant business success, regardless of external financial conditions, competitive challenges or any other factors.

About 2 and half decades down the line, Moments of Truth still continues to be a truthful, profound ethos of everything that customer-centric companies should aspire to be. Today, Touchpoint Marketing simply tries to build upon these ideas through the twin lenses of Analytics and Social Media. Some impossibly powerful tools that were yet to be discovered way back in 1987.

To know more, continue reading the fourth part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 2: Are Your Satisfied and Loyal Customers Committed Enough?

Are Your Satisfied and Loyal Customers Committed Enough?

This is the second part of a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. Catch-up on the first part here

 

• How often have you come across a wonderful piece of direct mailer that makes you feel ‘The chosen one’?
• Yes, retailers keep blasting us with end-of-season, fresh-stocks, and clearance sale mailers on a perennial basis. But those are generic mailers. How often have we seen a customized mailer or offer from a retail chain?
• Our Banks and Insurance firms keep us occupied with higher interest rates mailers and ‘we care about you’ kind of mushy mailers. But how often have you witnessed a terrific pitch of up-sell or cross-sell from your bankers/insurers?
• Everyone has been doing database-based telemarketing since the birth of Christ, but how often have you come across a genuine case that talks just to you? A Marketer who actually knows your attitude, preferences, lifestyle and lifestage and has a terrific offer ‘Just for you’!
• My hatchback car company never reached out to me for a potential upgrade. I love their latest Sedan. Just a gentle nudge, some offer, some freebies…and I am sold on. But no one ever attempted this.
• My Insurance firm never tried a potential cross-sell for a kids plan despite being well aware of my lifestage.
• My online holiday provider was of good help during my last vacations. But they never reached out again with some exotic offers and locations for my next vacation.
• My executive education service provider takes web-based management lessons to the length and breadth of this country. However, closer home, its own team is struggling for simple customer service etiquettes.

Makes me wonder, where is all that Analytics going into? Is it sitting in water-tight silos? Does all the output from ivory tower data warehouses goes in creating only historical patterns, trends and dashboards? The predictability, the power to predict that we keep talking about, never reaches the on-the-field marketing teams?

In today’s age of ubiquitous feedback forms and KYCs, do companies actually KTCs i.e. Know Their Customers?

To improve sales, you don't necessarily need more customers. You need better customers.

A concept wonderfully explained in Jan Hofmeyr & Butch Rice’s seminal work in Commitment-led Marketing.

The customers that your data says are your most satisfied may be the most likely to leave tomorrow. So are you asking the right questions and measuring the right dimensions? Some customers appear to be loyal because they habitually buy a product, but this does not mean they are committed to it. They appear to be loyal because in all probability they don’t have many options. They may be the first to fly off your radar the moment another similar product arrives. More like commitment levels in many long-term marriages and relationships. Many times, loyalty could just be a virtue of lack of exciting options! 

Loyalty is what customers do. Commitment is what they feel! Customers can appear deceptively loyal but actually be uncommitted (they might only use the brand because everyone else does (Microsoft), through lack of choice, affordability, or distribution. Commitment-led Marketing is about creating a Conversion Model that allows companies to segment users by commitment to stay, and non-users by openness to adopt their brand. By applying this to their brand, and competitors, companies can identify the right strategy to defend share (if they are a large brand), or steal it (if small). It’s time companies and marketers start acting on the fact that customer satisfaction is a poor predictor of behavior – commitment is better. How many committed customers are being created and nurtured across their Touchpoints?

Many businesses believe mass advertising through email marketing, billboards, radio/TV, direct mail and other channels alone will drive sales. They couldn’t be more half-baked in their assumption.  ‘Above the Line’ Media simply creates awareness, interest levels, enquiries, walk-ins and at best, trial purchases. Beyond that, it’s your brand attributes and service features that take over.

Many businesses simply create the pre-requisite Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter home pages and think they’ve cracked the Social Media Marketing (SMM) puzzle. Just beaming over the no. of likes and shares (most often by your own employees) can’t be the only defining metrics for SMM. It’s more about how your brand has adapted or presented itself in the social media context. How is your brand engaging (and not just informing and entertaining) with the online customer?

This shotgun outbound marketing approach (one to many) is very helpful in creating the ‘Brand Decibels’ – the awareness. It ensures is setting up potential customers’ first meeting with your brand. Beyond that it’ your ‘Touchpoints’ that need to make conversations, conversions, establish connect, build relationships, drive repeat purchase and most importantly enforce commitment. Touchpoint-based marketing is all about smart and focused client retention through effective inbound marketing. All the marketing media, with their distinct reach and impact, help building your brand saliency (awareness). But what actually builds a Brand is what happens when the customer ‘pull’ results in equally impactful customer service or product commitment.

To know more, continue reading the third part of this seven-part series here

Touchpoint Marketing Chapter 1: Do Companies Really Know You?

Do Companies Really Know You?

Starting today and through this week a seven-part series on Touchpoint Marketing. This is the first part of a seven-part series.

Organizations evolve. Steadily over a period of time. And as it goes in Organization Theory, they start getting more institutionalized through structures, levels, hierarchies, culture, values, policies and processes. Most of these aren’t really ‘etched in stone’ fundamentals that organizations begin with. But most of these keep getting formalized as organizations acquire client base, gather some momentum, expand their tentacles, carve their distinct identities, positioning, the mindspace amidst their customers. Both existing and potential.

The entire idea of Organization theory is a beautiful concept that allows companies to be much more efficient and effective in their chosen goal of serving their customers. Structures that allow the companies to get closer to their customers and serve them better.

Now, look around and try to think of all the companies you’ve ever dealt with. Right from your mobile service provider to banks to retailers. Right from big-ticket items like cars, consumer durables and holiday packages to everyday FMCG goods. How often have you been (allow me the cliché) ‘delighted’ as a customer? You think ‘delighted’ is too passé a word. Well there are a multitude of others doing the rounds – customer ecstasy, the ‘Wow’, the ‘Aha!’….an entire battery of such customer-isms depicting your satisfaction levels.

Moving beyond the world of Organization theory, let’s talk about the more glam sounding concepts of Research and Analytics. Insights, Marketing effectiveness, Marketing ROI, data, Big data, Predictability, Certainty, Measurements, CRM, Dashboards, Customer Scorecards, Business Intelligence, Measuring the intangibles, Smart Analytics. Phew!

Analytics (and its various avatars) are the biggest thing to have happened to Management since Lean and Six Sigma. It’s in, it’s cool, it’s intelligent and more of an imperative for your corporate existence to be talking about it. To discuss the magic of Analytics and how it has the potential to ‘Unravel’ (pardon the cliché once again) layers of customer insights, never known before! 

Companies are processing data, Big data by terabytes. You habits, spending patterns, ‘likes’ (it’s no longer a cute word preceding love. It means big business in today’s overtly ‘social’ times), your lifestyle is under constant surveillance. You are under constant, microscopic observations. As a customer, every day, every moment you are being studied, processed, segmented, clustered, regressed and character-sketched. You, the customer, are the subject, with multitude of subject matter experts knowing more about you than your father-in-law!

Wonderful times to live in, right? With so much customer-centric, infact customer-obsessed practices, you the customer, must be amidst the best of times, right? Yes? No!

Once again, think about all the Brands that are serving you right now. How many of these, do you think have really ‘delighted’ you off late?

My existing Bank sold me a Demat brokerage plan and I have since then been running from pillar to post to get it resolved. My multiple well-wishers in this bank right from Equity advisor, Relationship manager, Customer care Execs, Helpdesks, Head Service Quality, etc. have all suddenly vanished in thin air. What a wonderful Organization structure to be swimming in? Amidst all these glorified roles, everybody knows everything about everything. But no single body, knows that one single thing that it takes to (forget delight) Retain an irate customer.

The point being, amidst all this customer relationship and analytics jargon, how many companies are actually reaching out to their Existing customers? Note the word ‘Existing’. We’re not even including ‘potential’ customers in this debate.  Somewhere in our B-schools, we were entrenched with this wonderful insight –

‘It costs ten times to get a new customer as it takes to retain an existing customer.’

Now with companies going out all guns blazing to acquire newer customers, expand footprints, grab footfalls, eyeballs and all the works, is anyone even looking at this huge set of existing customers? 

“Yes, ofcourse” will be an emphatic response from the marketing and technology heads of most firms. “Why else do you think we’ve invested millions in super data-crunching machines and Apps?” We are generating existing customer spend and lifestyle patterns by the minute.

Fair enough. And that precisely, brings us back to the discussion. Think again. How often have we have seen the magic of all this Analytics actually ‘Touching’ us? In today’s age of multiple Touchpoints, are brands and companies actually ‘Touching’ us at all?

To know more, continue reading the second part of this seven-part series here

Deploying Advanced Analytics on Basic Financial Statements for Increasing Marketing Effectiveness

Deploying Advanced Analytics on Basic Financial Statements for Increasing Marketing Effectiveness

Genesis:

More often than not initiatives to increase marketing ROI are greeted with a lot of inertia and skepticism. All the more so in the banking sector, where marketing is more about seeing opportunities, conceptualizing new ideas, devising eye-ball grabbing campaigns ,and at best, generating the required ‘buzz’. The all essential ‘pull factor’ that brings a customer to your bank. Beyond this the conversions are more a factor of the customer service and the product teams. However, have the banks ever paused to consider the effects of missing out on a possible ‘target’ customer for a specific campaign? Or even more harmful, bringing in an incorrect ‘target’ who goes back feeing disgruntled about the product (for which he was never the right target to begin with).

The Background:

Banks offer a more diverse portfolio of services than before, and they do so over a wider range of channels. While this trend has given banks more latitude to compete, it has made formulating and modulating marketing strategies, tactics and programs considerably more complex. That’s because as the range of options has grown—a good thing by any measure—marketing resources are as scarce as ever. To optimize how they invest them, banks need a way to continually measure their effectiveness, learn what works and adapt over time.

On a positive note, it’s great that banks are considerably investing in costly primary research and reaching out to their customers/potential customers for their attitudes, preferences and disposition towards their products and services. However, the essential question is – Are banks effectively utilizing the terabytes of existing customer data already within their custody? The immediate answer could be an overwhelming ‘Yes’ for the larger banks with all the huge investments in data warehousing, business intelligence applications and scores of analytical teams. For the not so bigger banks, the answer could an ambitious “Yes, we’re getting there”. But some of the key questions for both these segments of banks would be –

1. Do the fast-paced marketing teams have an ongoing dialogue with such fortified warehousing and BI structures? Or do they exist as ‘happy to be mutually exclusive’ departments?
2. Are ‘Analytics’ and ‘BI’ still perceived to be statistical warehouses for more strategic initiatives? Teams that are more about using rocket-science statistics for pricing and product development decisions.
3. Does the term ‘Analytics’ still sounds intimidating for most marketers to reach out and deploy their marketing instincts?
4. Does it evoke inertia and/or phobia of being too data intensive? And thus too time and effort consuming in arranging and organizing the mostly unstructured data.
5. And along the way, has it become a widely accepted phenomenon of Analytics being too expensive for all its upfront licensing and implementations costs? 

For all the myths, perceptions and exaggerated expertise around ‘Analytics’, the simple premise for this blog piece is the basic question of (and pardon me for the repetition) ‘Are banks effectively utilizing the terabytes of existing customer data already within their custody?’ Are the banks seizing the huge opportunities offered by simple (and rich) transactional data in a customer’s monthly financial statements? A data that is ready to be consumed from the word GO! No structuring, no arranging, organizing or sanitizing. It’s there. It’s always been there. And it’s a dynamite of readily available information at no incremental cost (as in Primary research). And the biggest advantage is that it’s hardcore behavioral data that is completely insulated from the ill-effects of sampling, methodology, techniques and data collection practices of primary research. It’s all about what your customers actually are. How they have been actually behaving (over a period of time) instead of what they can do, intend to do or aspire to be like.

The Idea:

1. Reap the benefits of advanced analytics in not-so analytics friendly (and perhaps not so prepared) environments piloting through available transactional data.
2. Cut the lead time, inertia and phobia that’s associated with undertaking advanced analytic projects.
3. Make analytics more accessible to the tactical and fast-paced world of intuitive marketers. Insights that reaffirm their conviction to pursue certain initiatives. At the same time, highlight hard-entrenched trends that dissuade them from committing costly marketing mistakes.
4. Identify and exploit finer consumer niches (as evident in each customer’s actual financial transactions) rather than trying to milk homogenous mega-segments (most often force-fitted) through mass-market marketing initiatives. Not every HNI thinks and behaves the same. So how then, is he/she expected to be driven by similar stimuli?
5. The core idea is to shift from the ‘marketing-as-an expense’ mindset to the idea that marketing is a true profit driver.  

  

The Methodology: 

1. It starts with creating a mega data warehouse of all existing transactional data across all customers over the past 3 years…atleast. And as it goes in statistics, the more the merrier. 
2. Go granular! Start with a detailed understanding of each customer’s banking needs drawn directly from his purchase patterns, lifestage trends and changes in purchasing power over a longer period of time.
3. Using predictive analytics models, each customer is “scored” on their likelihood to purchase each product in a bank’s portfolio. The corollary benefit of this approach is that it helps the bank’s marketers to pinpoint product clusters that represent “sweet spots” for cross-selling opportunities.
4. The basic principle in such an approach is a continually evolving model. The model’s analytics uncover new behavioral patterns that can be translated into new marketing programs, as well as to fine-tune existing ones.

The Benefits:

1. The biggest benefit would be the degree to which this model can be woven into the company’s marketing ‘DNA’.  The ability to monitor each (rapidly evolving) customer and align tactical marketing decisions in sync with the most profitable opportunities.
2. The model relies on constantly updated customer account information, enabling it to detect changes in service consumption patterns and preferences. It generates customer segment profiles on purchase patterns, spending power and lifestage and allows a bank identify and target the most attractive segments.
3. The predictive analytics model provides the basis to shift marketing resources from lower performing programs to those with the highest ROI.

The Possibilities to Leverage this Model:

1. Analyze customer behavior to identify key predictors of customer satisfaction.
1. Measure and track customer loyalty in multiple ways to target retention efforts.
2. Satisfy and retain valuable and profitable customers and attract others like them.
3. Increase customer satisfaction and lifetime value by continually tracking customer attitudes and responding to emerging problems and opportunities.
4. Prompt people (or systems) to proactively address issues of customer satisfaction, applying appropriate resources (e.g. rewards, promotion, loyalty program) to improve customer retention.
2. Develop and deliver customer-driven products, services, tie-ups and alliances for target customers.
1. Identify customer segments and use them to better target promotional campaigns.
2. Cluster customers into groups, determine what characteristics are common and what characteristics are different between groups.
3. Optimize marketing efforts by testing concepts, imagery and messages before deployment.
4. Identify which customers are likely to respond to specific promotional offers.
3. Increase the profitability of customer interactions by maximizing the value of up-sell or cross-sell opportunities.
4. Make customer-centric decisions with far greater confidence.
1. Gain predictive insights that improve marketing campaigns, increase satisfaction and ensure loyalty.
2. Empower business users with the ability to create and operationalize predictive analytics.
3. Produce more accurate predictions by utilizing all available data collected about customers.

To conclude, what can be the expected Success Criterion? Where could banks see immediate Returns and Benefits ?

Well, here are some immediate marketing victories -

1. Increase in response to marketing campaigns across all the essential campaign parameters i.e. awareness, enquiries/walk-ins and conversions.
2. Reduction in all below the line campaign costs i.e. direct mailers, calls or even mass-market banking activities that can be sharper and narrower in their target audience invitations.
3. More entrenched and involved customers that can be well-reflected in parallel Primary research activities as well (higher awareness and disposition, lower possibilities to deflect, higher proportion of multi-product customers).
4. Improvements across the board in key metrics like –
1. Customer lifetime value
2. Gains in YoY customer spending
3. Reduced Attrition

So now, here’s circling back to the basic question once again ‘Are banks effectively utilizing the terabytes of existing customer data already within their custody?’ Are we ready to unravel the huge opportunities offered by the humble (and yet powerful) monthly financial statements? Can Analytics shrug off a bit of its intimidating persona and be readily accessible for the instinct-driven Marketing. Can Marketing evolve to be more Instinctively Intelligent?