Customer Experience Crossroads

This just in: lots of financial services news

2008-07-04T06:23:00-04:00

There seems to be a lot happening in the financial services space these days, some of it good, and some of it clearly a wrong turn however well intentioned. [None of the latter shown below]

Underbanked Americans

The Centre for Financial Services Innovation, whose focus is the low end of the demographic spectrum, has just released new research results on the underbanked. Some 40 million households are unbanked (no active bank account) or underbanked (may have a bank account but is actively transacting with non-banks).

The demographics are interesting: more than half own a home, more than half are white/non-Hispanic, and almost half work full time. As you read the attitudinal and behavioral material, the surprises just continue. A six page download presents a good summary, including an overview of 8 attitudinal segments. There is also a free webcast scheduled for July 8.

Payments in your watch

Why have your paypass on your key-fob when you could have it in your watch? That's the reasoning behind the launch of the Altair's PayPass wristwatch that uses MasterCard's contactless payment technology. This is not the first such innovation, but we're bound to see more of this in the future, through the competing technologies related to telephones or cards. Reminds one of the cable versus telephone battle that still wages. (Read more about this in Finextra here).

Visa on Facebook target SMBs

Visa has launched a new social networking application through Facebook target SMBs. The incentive to join is $100 toward targeted Facebook advertising, an interesting idea. Features include expert Q&A that would be similar to LinkedIn. I applaud them for trying this, and building an application that could potentially provide support for things other than information. What I'm not sure yet is how you prevent these things from becoming a really giant version of the Yellow Pages. (Thanks again to Finextra for the heads up)

Mobile P2P payments

MasterCard has launched a P2P payments network accessible through your mobile phone, in the US. The story from Finextra references Tower Group research suggesting that the growth curve here is exponential. The target market here is the underbanked -- the 40 million households referenced above -- and the huge international remittance business.

The major impediment to widespread adoption of this kind of service will be that it threatens the existing infrastructure. But people are bound to like the idea of having the bank machine in their pocket.

Teens and technology

I did some research on teens use of technology that gives strong support to the notion of the handset as the main access device. Imagine mobile computing without having to drag a laptop around -- how cool would that be! I put the slides for a recent presentation on this project on slideshare.

Sticky receipts: how to get people from the pump to the store

2008-06-30T11:24:00-04:00

I was getting gas for the Vespa yesterday. [Mostly I don't have to get gas, as house elves seem to keep the four-wheeled vehicle fueled. The house-elves don't ride, however. So a whole new world of customer experiences is opening up for me here.]
I used my VISA card to pay at the pump, and at the end got a message that says "receipt available inside". Interesting on several levels:

reduces the operational demands on the pump. No printer, no paper to replace. Might even be something they can say is greener, because it reduces paper litter
provides an alternative that encourages you to go in to the store where you might buy something
is only a slight inconvenience to achieve these benefits

Additional remarks posted July 1
There are some pretty interesting comments below. I admit to having been being mildly annoyed by this process. But others are much more seriously ticked. I'd love to know what the real story is here. [i.e. what the real strategy is, and if it is working].

As an alternative method to get people into your store, I'd suggest printing a receipt with a tear-off coupon or offer on it for a discounted coffee, chips, etc.

Three big takeaways

2008-06-26T16:23:08-04:00

A reader suggested I try to summarize the key themes from this year's Idea City. I could hardly lay claim to customer experience expertise and fail to respond to readers, now could I? So here are my big takeaways, along with what I think this means for marketers and those who create customer experiences. [And thanks for the suggestion, Estaban.]

[1] The information technology curve is not linear, it's exponential. It is still picking up speed.

This might sound pretty pedestrian at the outset, but it isn't. Exponential curves tend to look slower in the beginning and faster later on. We've seen this many times in terms of adoption rates, improvement in technology performance, total production of information in a year, etcetera. [Example: for a long time, people thought there was no role for computers in the home. Now we have computers everywhere.And we keep finding new places to put them.]

What I learned at Idea City was that human biology has been treated somewhat mechanistically in the past. Now it is being treated -- by scientists -- as an information system. So things like medical research and commercialization of that learning will now start to follow this pattern.

There are many societal implications of this, but I see a number for marketers and customer experience folk as well. One is that social networking applications are going to just get better and better. It is not a passing fad. The future might not be Facebook, but clearly we like the possibilities of connecting virtually. Whatever clunkiness exists will disappear. There is not going to be an easier time to get in the game and start the organizational learning process. Further delays will only leave you behind the curve.

[2] People are going to start living a lot longer, and this is going to happen faster than we expected

Boomers have no plans to fade into the sunset. We can already see the impact of this. But science seems to be on the verge of really making an impact on aging.

If we get longer lives with reasonable health -- say the health and vitality of a fifty-year-old into our nineties -- every institution, public and private, is going to be affected. Most of the speakers focused on the science that is going to make this happen. A few touched on the implications for public policy, like pensions. But the impacts will be pervasive.

[3] There are no rules

People who make big advances in any field are the ones who ignore the conventional wisdom. Jun Ye, the builder of an atomic clock that ticks 430 trillion times per second said this: "At the edge of the universe, you are looking at the universe that was just formed. At the beginning of the universe, physical laws could not all be the same as they are today". So even the laws of physics may not be immutable.

If you want to do something in your business that is exceptional, you need to extract the conventional from your thinking.

[4] Teaching is not as interesting as sharing the experience of passion. Humor is also highly engaging.

The best speakers are always those that just talk about what they are interested in and do it in a way that the foundational knowledge for their field does not become a barrier. They tell stories. They talk about implications. And they make people laugh. They are not all serious.

If scientists can be this interesting, surely we can do better in our customer communications: stop being so serious; tell more stories; and show some passion for the content.

Idea City 08 - what I learned about ideas today

2008-06-20T11:09:08-04:00

The best speaker this morning was Matthew Diffee, who does hilarious cartoons for The New Yorker. And had some pretty interesting things to say about ideas as well.

"In any business, coming up with ideas helps."

He says the question he gets asked most often is, how do you come up with your ideas? His answer: "Like you, I think of them."

He went on to explain that ideas are actually work, and require thinking. He suggests that it is a good idea to get in the habit of creating new ideas frequently. The important thing is not to have "one great idea" -- it's to have "thousands of good ideas."

His closing thoughts were also pretty wise, despite being humorous: "You're probably not as good as you think you are. But you're also probably not as bad as some other people think you are."

Good words to remember on those days when you think you might never have another good idea.