Deloitte Customer UK

Digital in a regulated industry

2013-05-16T13:00:00+01:00

After working within the utilities industry for several years, I have come across challenges that many regulated organisations face when trying to manage and deliver changes in the fast moving world of digital.

In an industry where it is hard to differentiate yourself, such as utilities, a great digital customer experience can be the difference between retaining a customer and losing a customer. Customers have an expectation that they will be able to sign up to products online, manage their account online and do all of this without any instabilities in performance. If this expectation isn’t met, customers will become frustrated, have a negative brand perception and may eventually be inclined to move their business elsewhere.

Within the utilities industry, there is often the added pressure of having the finger pointed when profits are posted or when prices go up. Utilities companies have a responsibility to educate their customers about any changes taking effect and providing digital functionality for customers to engage with can enable a deeper understanding of prices, products and how the customer can make savings.

There are several key enablers that clients can utilise to help manage digital change and improve digital customer experiences:

Managing digital:
A centralised management structure will help increase internal focus on driving the digital channel forward and will set up the framework for investment.

Adopting agile processes in the digital team will help push basic content live quickly (a frequent demand) and will service many internal stakeholder requirements.
A close relationship between the digital contact centres and the digital management teams also builds closer working relationships. Measures should be taken to bring relevant teams closer together in terms of location (i.e. product managers and CMS authors) to enable quicker change.

Improving customer experiences:
Intelligent cross sell/up sell: tailoring web experiences for your customer-base and for future prospects is crucial to delivering a personalised experience.

Becoming an analytics-driven organisation: understand customer journeys, take time to analyse drop-off points and use analytics to justify change to senior stakeholders.
Focus on optimisation: don’t just focus on the things you have to put on the website. Set up the digital team to have an ‘optimisation’ stream with product managers feeding regular change in through sprint cycles using multivariate testing. This will become the innovative digital team that internal stakeholders want to take advantage of.

Following these key principles will put organisations in a good position to deliver great customer-centric digital experiences. Using agile delivery as a change method will enable a prioritised focus to website change but a process is certainly required to bypass release dates to push minor content changes live quickly.

Lee Putman
Lee is a consultant in the Deloitte Customer Service & Experience practice, focusing primarily on digital projects across private sector clients. Key areas of interest include website transformation, digital channel strategy, social CRM and website optimisation.
Connect with Lee on LinkedIn.

Oracle CloudWorld Roadshow

2013-05-10T16:40:40+01:00

Having debuted in Dubai in January, the CloudWorld Roadshow reaches London this coming Tuesday 14th May when it hits the ExCel Centre.

In today’s digital world customer expectations and the rules of customer engagement are changing. As a result, organisations are beginning to transform the ways in which they conduct their business by turning to the cloud. The Oracle CloudWorld Roadshow has been travelling globally and has been designed to connect customers, thought leaders, executives, partners and those with an interest with leading cloud technologies to share ideas on how businesses can leverage the cloud; from service to infrastructure, platform to social – helping them get ahead of the business challenges they face today.

Within the specialised Customer track, our main focus will be on how the changing consumer landscape is setting new expectations and causing organisations to rethink how they provide a differentiated customer experience in order to retain and grow their customer base. Our session will also explore external market factors, looking at the internal capabilities required to support the experience and provide real life examples of where clients have achieved this already.

For customers and partners alike the aim of the exhibition is being able to facilitate the conversations that matter:

Plenty of Q&A sessions: in-depth and tailored to specific industries.
A wide variety of topics: from "next generation web experiences," to "re-skilling your workforce."
It’s not all talk: customers and partners are attending with practical examples and hands-on demos/experience. Our Deloitte Customer team will be there so do come find us.

For those with little prior experience of Oracle's suite, CloudWorld is an excellent opportunity to find out more about this area. With no technical background required, real-world case studies fill the agenda so you can see how Oracle's offerings are being implemented.

Here at Deloitte, we are very excited to be attending as a Platinum Sponsor. Alongside shaping the agenda for the day, we will be leading a number of specialised keynote presentations for Finance, HR and Customer tracks. This event promises to be an exciting and innovative day and is an excellent opportunity to find out more about this area. Registration is free and the day’s agenda can be found here.

We hope to see you in person on Tuesday May 14th but if you’re unable to attend, throughout the day we will be tweeting updates, so follow us on Twitter @DeloitteCustUK and keep an eye out for hashtag #cloudworld.

Ben Morgan
Ben leads our CRM Applications team Banking. He has 15 years of package implementation experience and has spent the last 14 years focusing on CRM Ben works with clients to define, resource and deliver their most complex transformation projects. He has developed his skills through various projects ranging from CRM and front office transformations, core system replacements and more recently analytics and big data engagements. Ben has worked extensively with offshore development and understands the complexities of working in such models. Alongside his banking interests, Ben leads the Deloitte Oracle relationship from a Customer perspective and works closely with a number of other vendors in the banking, analytics and experience space.
Connect with Ben on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

How to monetise original digital content

2013-05-07T12:01:00+01:00

In a crowded market-place where information is a commodity on the web, customers want original, quality content. This creates a challenge for publishers when it comes to turning a profit, particularly general news sites which do not have a product that is specialised enough to justify a successful pay wall. The reason for this is that premium content is costly to produce. This is due to expensive journalists on the pay roll as well as big-money celebrity partnerships. Popular editorial content also requires good pictures, which cost thousands of pounds.

To offset this high cost base, let’s consider how a publisher can increase existing revenue streams by making the most of its web space and content.

New audience growth
Publishers can grow their audience in many ways, including marketing, search and distribution. Once they have created an attractive destination site, it is simpler to attract customers with a marketing campaign. Search is also highly effective. Although original content typically performs well in natural search, this can be improved through search engine optimisation (SEO) or a paid search campaign.

Distribution deals will also grow new unique visitors (UVs) and page views (PVs). Cash free ‘traffic exchange’ deals can be agreed, where the publisher asks another site to send them traffic in return for them directing traffic back via RSS feeds and curated modules. New traffic can also be sent to a publisher using paid services such as Stumble Upon Paid Discovery.

Finally consider content syndication. If a publisher has spent time and money creating original content, they have ownership rights and should capitalise on this. They can do this by striking deals with other publishers to integrate sections of their website into the partner’s site. The publisher who owns the content hosts it, however, it uses the partner’s website header and it appears to be the partner’s content. The advantage for the partner is that their audience has access to content they have not had to spend time and money producing, while the publisher receives a revenue share from the advertising inventory sold.

Audience recirculation
Recirculating existing traffic increases page views. To do this effectively the web page layout needs to be considered. The website’s homepage is a good traffic generator to other channels, as most people land on the homepage first. Many websites have a rotating content module on their homepage (where the user can click through many content links within the same module). Managing this well increases traffic recirculation from the homepage to other channels; methods include monitoring the click-through rate to replace the lower performing links and promoting content from channels which need more web inventory to fully deliver booked advertising campaigns. Effective strategies also include using attention grabbing text links and images throughout the page and where possible running engaging, clickable video content.

Existing traffic should also be recirculated to the homepage. This can be done by creating links against original content in channels, for when the customer journey does not start on the homepage. If the website is part of a larger group of sites (e.g. online news sites are usually part of a larger organisation), traffic can be recirculated from other sites within the ecosystem.

Revenue
As revenue equals price multiplied by volume, an attractive commercial proposition is needed to justify a good price. Having addressed the volume side, let’s consider price. Alongside a strong brand proposition and high reach, this can be achieved by sophisticated advertising formats and interactive branded content sections.

To summarise, it is important for a premium content web destination to scale their audience. Not only will a subscale audience mean that there is less web inventory to sell, it also means there are additional demands on Sales and Client Services teams. As well as being a harder sell, not being a ‘must have’ on the agency/client media plan means that commercial teams are expected to bend rules and adhere to quicker turnaround times when launching media campaigns.

Julie Coleman
Julie is a Senior Consultant in Deloitte’s Customer practice. She has over seven years’ of digital media experience across advertising and content production within agency and publisher environments. Through her time in this industry she has worked in both pure media and consulting roles.
Connect with Julie on LinkedIn.

Profiting from social: the need for analytics

2013-05-02T14:02:41+01:00

In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed the opportunities and challenges social media presents for organisations, and identified four areas that they must get right in order to ensure social media success. I argued that organisations must clearly understand how they are performing in the social sphere. And it is to this idea, that of social analytics, that I return to now.

The use of social media in business brings a distinct set of challenges. Foremost among these is the scepticism that C-suite executives often display towards social. While social is increasingly seen as a part of the complex, fragmented modern marketing mix, it is rarely seen as central to it. There is an understandable, natural hesitancy in many large organisations to adopt new channels for customer engagement; after all, they need to be certain that current trends are not just a flash in the pan.

But with social, there is another key limiting factor: the lack of proper analytics. Meaningful goals and outputs for social media are hard to define and, more importantly, difficult to tie back to business benefits. Setting targets for reach or engagement through social media platforms is all well and good, but these will only gain traction in the organisation if they can be tied back to key metrics such as sales and profitability. In short, then, executives want to know whether engendering social conversation is actually making them money. Without this certainty, many organisations simply use social ‘because we should’, without a clear strategy and, as a result, fail to realise the benefits of social fully.

Given this situation, the field of social analytics remains surprisingly underdeveloped. The market is certainly saturated with social listening services and social CRM providers; companies that can ‘scrape’ and summarise data on a particular organisation or product from social platforms. A smaller number then offer nominally analytical services, which work on the basis of analysing social media metrics and sales data in isolation. But what is lacking is a solution that can actually prove this direct link between social media conversation and sales and profitability, rather than simply assuming a correlation.

Claiming causality around social media – that seeing a particular post or taking part in a social conversation is the defining factor stimulating a purchase – is difficult, maybe even prohibitively difficult. But the same is true of all marketing channels. What organisations can legitimately desire, however, is a service that considers social buzz as just one part of the purchasing decision, and combines social media metrics with broader data on sales and advertising spend to identify attribution. Until this challenge is tackled, many organisations will continue to struggle to elevate social to the same level of importance as traditional and digital media channels as part of marketing campaigns.

Luke Howard
Luke sits in Deloitte’s Marketing & Insight practice. His work focuses on Customer and Social Analytics, particularly the use of business insights to improve customer engagement, increase marketing effectiveness and inform growth strategies.
Read Luke's previous blogs How social media is changing brand management and Four ways to win with social media.
Connect with Luke on LinkedIn.

Salesforce Customer Company Tour

2013-04-30T12:00:00+01:00

This Thursday (May 2nd), Salesforce.com is back at the ExCeL London for its annual showcase event, the Customer Company Tour.

The Customer Company Tour is designed to connect customers, partners and developers with an enthusiasm for Salesforce and its vision for businesses meeting the challenge of transforming customer engagement. You can look forward to:

Keynote speeches from Salesforce COO George Hu and Doug Bewsher, CMO, in which they will outline their vision for Customer Companies and reveal real customer stories demonstrating impressive ROI.
Attendance of over 3,000 Salesforce professionals looking to broaden their horizons and network with their peers.
In the Cloud ExPo, Salesforce partners will be exhibiting the best in class methodologies and practices. Do come find us here!

Here at Deloitte we are very excited to be attending. Our representatives from across Deloitte’s European and US practices will be out en masse, making the most of the great hands-on learning opportunities, engaging with industry thought leaders and product experts, and elaborating on the latest emerging trends.

Salesforce.com has rebranded last year’s CloudForce to emphasise the importance of putting the customer at the heart of everything you do. It is a theme that we are passionate about here at Deloitte. Our very own Ben Morgan has highlighted in previous blog posts the importance of customer centricity. Within this context, understanding the revolution that is taking place in social, local and mobile is an imperative. It is changing the very nature by which customers interact. At the kick off for the Customer Company Tour at Boston, Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, reiterated “These things coming together, not any one of them, but all of them, social and mobile and big data and community and apps and cloud and trust. This is the customer revolution and this changes how we have to think about our businesses.”

With the focus increasingly on mobile first we are thrilled to debut the new Pocketforce iPhone app, designed and built by our Deloitte Digital studio. The app allows Salesforce users to view and edit Account and Opportunity records online and offline. In a world where mobile connectivity is still imperfect, we want to ensure Salesforce users can continue to have that great user experience even where they are offline or on low signal. Pocketforce will be displayed on a large interactive screen at the event by our Salesforce mobility experts, and they will be pleased to expand further. The cloud meets offline for opportunity management, and best of all it is free!

We hope you come find us on the day but if you are unable to attend, throughout the day we will be tweeting updates, so do follow us at @DeloitteCustUK.

Matt Robins
Matt is an Analyst in Deloitte’s Customer Applications & Data practice. He has a keen interest in the digital transformation of customer experience, resulting from the convergence of factors such as mobile, social and analytics. His industry focus is private sector, with experience primarily in FMCG.
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.

After deployment: maintaining momentum with your collaboration tool

2013-04-23T12:01:00+01:00

The implementation has gone to plan on time and in budget (naturally), your users are up and running reporting back that training was none other than very good or excellent, projector glitches and room availability aside. So despite the initial promising signs why is user adoption dropping? How do you maintain momentum?

Collaboration tools won’t survive without due care and attention, and timely consideration of the below could make the difference:

Focussed attention on senior stakeholders: typically, a senior member of staff’s participation on a collaboration tool has a wide impact, generating discussion, ‘likes’ and idea sharing. It’s a quick way for people to publically praise others - imagine being a junior copyright and a senior editor ‘likes’ one of your ideas? The negative impact of limited participation makes junior members of staff question ‘maybe this isn’t the tool for me’? More practically, if messages shared on collaboration tools are not seen by all intended, then it may be a struggle to have a successful system. So what can you do about it? Ensure that the tool is made relevant to all, provide senior members with examples of success stories, write comments for them to get them up and running and work with them on a regular schedule of updates to be shared to the business using the collaboration tool.

Provide BAU training: provide users with the opportunity to be re-trained - a collaboration tool can be a real step-change in ways of working and can take a while to become real. Second wave training allows people to ask the questions they would have missed the first time round. Additionally, (and perhaps more obviously!) collaboration tool training must be part of the on-boarding of each new joiner.

Who owns this: the collaboration tool should not be left without an formal owner. Once the implementers have left, the collaboration tool should not fall into disrepair. A governance body should be assembled in order to allow the tool to continue to develop, to define what the purpose is and future looks like. It will fail without active monitoring and nurture. A top community manager can help connect conversations, prune groups that aren’t needed any more and help make sure communications stay on track. They can also help keep the divide between social and work related groups, so the cycling club’s posts don’t get mixed up with the sales team’s!

Channel exclusivity: give your users access to unique and exclusive comms and content. Rather than sending out newsletters via email, why not on your collaboration system? This will help pull those who are after the latest news into the system, and hopefully get them commenting and contributing on what’s being sent out. Channel exclusivity can go wider still, and there is real value in reviewing current business processes to see where activities can be driven through the platform to help sustain usage. On a less formal basis, the system can also be a great place to run competitions and shout about success across the organisation, boosting awareness and morale.

Give people a reason to come back: critical to the success of your collaboration system will be giving users a reason to keep coming back. For many, their reason is access to great content and valuable, successful collaboration. It’s crucial to encourage your high performers to post content and ideas in the system to keep others coming back, and your community manager can help join up conversations to help users get real value. Don’t be afraid to archive older and less useful content – your PowerPoint aficionados might not appreciate wading through years of old slides to find the document they are after!

In considering the above, it will give people a reason to keep coming back and fewer excuses not to. It will also help the tool reach a critical tipping point where users are compelled to embrace change and engage as it becomes an integral tool in the business and in their ways of working.

Hannah Goodey

Hannah is a consultant in the Deloitte Customer Marketing and Insight practise, focussing primarily on CRM and collaboration tool implementation projects across private sector clients. Key areas of interest include internal collaboration, customer service, Social CRM and digital marketing. Read Hannah's previous blog Collaboration: begin with a pilot, take it for a test drive

Connect with Hannah on LinkedIn and Twitter.

David Ross

David is a Consultant in the Customer practise specialising in the use of technology to improve sales force effectiveness. He has experience across the private and third sector, and passionately believes that social has the capability to transform businesses for the better. Read David's previous blogs Deploying a collaboration tool into your business: touch, paus, engage and Monetising the big data deluge.

Connect with David on Linkedin and Twitter.

Direct to consumer

2013-04-15T12:01:00+01:00

Consumers have never been so well connected. They are embracing digital media and are increasingly confident about interacting online:

More than half of UK consumers currently own a smartphone and adoption of technology is growing at an exponential rate¹.
Digitally-influenced shoppers spend more per transaction than ‘store only’ shoppers and are worth 44% of all (non-food) sales².
Digitally-influenced consumers are more loyal with 46% willing to share personal data with retailers in exchange for special offers².
14% of consumers trust messages provided by the brand, whereas 90% trust brand messages from friends and peers³.

Consumer products companies are responding to this shift in consumer behaviour and are increasingly interacting directly with their consumers. They are building brand engagement through communication channels such as content-rich media, online communities and social networking sites, as well as achieving revenue growth through direct sales channels such as proprietary websites, flagship stores, marketplace websites and online partnerships.

For example, Diageo has just launched a new online platform to sell its portfolio of premium spirits as well as opening a flagship store - the Johnnie Walker House – in Beijing for its Scottish whisky brand. P&G has experimented with digital walls and has the P&G e-store, an online transactional site for all products across categories. Apple and Nespresso have highly designed and interactive flagship stores, creating unique spaces to engage directly with their consumers. Various consumer products businesses such as L’Oreal trial and sell products through social networking sites. This is a trend that will only grow.

Interacting directly with consumers can be complementary to existing trade relationships, selling personalised or innovative products or a broader product range than would normally fit within established channels or within a retailer’s product or price hierarchy.

Going direct to consumer can provide consumer products businesses with significant benefits. Communicating directly with consumers in a two-way dialogue can promote consumer loyalty, provide insight on consumer trends as well as providing instant product feedback, all of which drive analytical product portfolio and innovation decisions. Selling directly to consumers either through a physical retail presence such as flagship stores gives companies greater control over margins, consistent brand positioning and increased access to valuable consumer data.

Read more about Deloitte’s direct-to-consumer proposition, ‘Connecting with today’s consumer: building brand value’.

References:

1         The dawn of mobile influence, Deloitte Digital, September 2012
2         The Connected Consumer, Deloitte, 2012
3         Global Trust in Advertising and Brand Messages, Nielsen Trust Survey, The Nielson Company, April 2012

Emily Faiz
Emily is a Senior Consultant in Deloitte’s People & Programme’s practice. She has over five years experience and specialises in organisation design in the consumer business industry. Most recently she has worked on a target operating model project for a global CPG organisation.

Connect with Emily on LinkedIn.

Keeping the customer loyal

2013-04-09T12:00:00+01:00

In today’s challenging economic environment, the importance of holding onto existing customers is more paramount than ever. Too many organisations prioritise acquiring new business from new sources when much of the real value can be found right in front of them – it just needs to be nurtured in the right way. A focus on building loyalty within the existing customer base will create brand advocates organically and, ultimately, stimulate growth.

Brand advocacy is not an overnight process. Rather, it is a relentless, consistent and long-term approach to delivering the best customer experience possible. Every touch point that the customer has with a business (and vice versa) needs to be best-in-class: richly personalised and highly efficient. This means having a ‘customer-pull’ culture driving organisations’ operating models.

Here are five simple steps to foster this ethos:

Get social: we know that social media’s power cannot be underestimated. It is a unique contemporary market research tool and the opportunities that it presents for organisations to engage in direct, real-time conversation with vast segments of their customer base are unprecedented. Leveraging social listening technologies means companies can understand their customers’ needs and wants now and respond accordingly – building satisfaction and loyalty in the process.
Provide exceptional customer service: it’s all very well having good customer service – but that has now become the benchmark: ‘good’ is the new expectation. To differentiate, companies need to provide a stand-out service that over-delivers, goes beyond expectations and ultimately makes a marked impression on the customer. Customers shouldn’t merely endure the service businesses provide, they should enjoy it. That way, they’ll come back again and again, bringing new customers with them in the process.
Engage in constant communication and dialogue: using whatever means and channels are most relevant, organisations need to ensure a system is in place for reaching out to existing customer base – and that doesn’t just mean blanket marketing messages. By engaging in a personalised dialogue with customers, they will move from being passive consumers to active participants in an organisation’s brand. This participation will quickly mature into advocacy.
Offer relevant customer incentives and rewards: having started their formal journey in the airline industry, loyalty programmes have, er, taken off – from coffee outlets to supermarkets, high-street banks to fashion retailers, we are now bombarded with them every day. Through the clutter, it can be hard for organisations to stand out. The key to do so is offering incentives and rewards that are relevant to the customer on an individual level. Simply, care about each and every customer, give them what they want, and they will stay!
Utilise big data: understanding data underpins all of this. By leveraging data analytics and predictive modelling techniques, patterns can be scientifically analysed, behaviours can be anticipated, and potential lapsers within customer bases can be identified – and targeted with tailored retention campaigns. The main idea here is around being proactive, rather than reactive: understand the customer better than they understand themselves!

Ultimately, loyal customers are a profitable breed: their willingness to pay price premiums, combined with the potential cost savings that they generate, creates a very attractive proposition indeed. It’s time for organisations to drive that proposition and shift the focus of their operations to consolidation and retention – this means knowing your customer inside out and putting them at the heart of your business.

Jack Samler
Jack is an Analyst in Deloitte’s Customer Consulting practice. He has a keen interest in social media and digital engagement in the context of the customer experience, specifically customer service, customer relationship management and brand / marketing / sales strategy. His industry focus is the private sector, with experience that includes work in television production, broadcasting, media asset management and online gaming.

Read Jack's previous blogs My top 5 social media campaigns of 2012 and The power of advertising.

Connect with Jack on LinkedIn.

Knowing the difference between a ‘Like’ and a like

2013-03-26T09:51:39+00:00

“I like my brand new car”.

“Driving my car is like driving a tank”.

“Like it or not, you need a car when you live in the country”.

If you are a car manufacturer, knowing how many people like (or don’t like) your new model is pretty useful. How many people like it? Is that better or worse than the previous model? Do they dislike the colour? Handling? Do they like the price? Any human can tell the difference between the above three statements - trying to get a machine to do this is not quite as easy.

In the time before social media, consumer focus groups were the medium through which this qualitative data was collated and fed back to product and R&D teams. Marketers had to venture out and discover these opinions. Now, the opinions are out there; marketers just need to find a way to tap into them. A series of focus groups may gather a richness of data from, perhaps, dozens of consumers. But with about one billion tweets every week, and growing, how about a richness of data from thousands? How about from hundreds of thousands? As consumers become increasingly socially connected and vocal about brands and products, this type of insight, at this scale, can be immensely valuable.

While the technology behind sentiment analysis has been around for some time, appetite for using sentiment analysis in making strategic and operational decisions – perhaps in deciding which products to launch – is gaining traction. Advanced sentiment analytics models can now score sentiment to a level of accuracy approximately the same as humans (about 70-80% by the way – even humans disagree…).

However, scoring sentiment accurately about a business or brand is not enough. To be actionable to a business, models must distil the expressions of sentiment down into more detailed dimensions. Which specific product is a customer talking about? Is the customer annoyed at the price or the colour? How do consumers feel about your corporate responsibility? Do customers like you? The combination of structuring this ‘noise’ into discrete dimensions, scored accurately, is where the insight starts to become really powerful. Yes… start. Take a business dataset – revenue data from different product lines perhaps – and compare it to sentiment data from the same product lines. You may find something quite compelling there.

I may sound like an evangelist, but by no means is sentiment analytics a panacea for businesses, nor is it easy to do (don’t be deceived by free online tools). Further, there may be challenges for certain industries which are seen as commoditised, where volume of opinion about specific brands is low. Or there may be internal challenges in convincing sceptical senior stakeholders that social media matters (it does) or that advanced models can live up to said claims (they can).

That said, it is important to understand the difference between a ‘Like’ and a like… and now we do.

Click here to review SentsCheck - an exciting, new digital sentiment analytics solution and quarterly index for the UK retail banking industry, launched recently by Deloitte.

Jayson Robinson
Jayson has written a number of previous posts including: Discriminalytics, Live in the Cloud and Cloudforce '12 wrap-up. Jayson is in the Customer Analytics team in Consulting and has worked across industries, using business data to maximise value within the business and with their customers.

Connect with Jayson on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Banking on customer-centricity

2013-03-19T14:59:07+00:00

Financial services is an industry that is not often perceived to put the customer at the heart of business models. The industry has sometimes been slow to adopt new technologies and customer relationship models and to respond to consumer needs.

However, recent economic and societal developments have changed the playing field irreversibly. The combination of: capital constraints, new regulation, low growth in mature markets, digitisation, and the rise of the connected consumer are hugely disruptive forces in the financial services landscape.

Some of the challenges the industry faces

New players have entered the market and have been able to swiftly offer a service more tailored to the needs of modern customers as they are not handicapped by legacy systems and operating models.
Mobile and online channels are transforming the landscape for consumers and becoming a preferred channel of interaction.
Regulation has changed the landscape for advice and sales, with many organisations still working through the impacts, risks and opportunities raised by changes to investment advice and conduct regulations.
Consumers’ confidence, especially within the ”millennials” is low. They are more skeptical and harder to engage with through traditional means, such as direct marketing, telephony and traditional advertising.

No one-size fits all response exists, but step one is to think customer-centric

There is no single catch-all for how institutions should respond to the new environment. In my view, the response should be driven by customer needs and by granular insight about that customer segment. Being ‘customer-centric’ risks becoming a buzz term, much like CRM became in 1999-2003. But when done properly, a customer-centric approach can drive exciting results and outperformance.

Operating models need to be customer-centric and collaborative. Instead of product silos think customer segments. Online must have more emphasis, internet channels should feel safe and secure but it should also be more engaging and interactive – allow instant messaging with customer service reps, provide useful content and look and feel as if it was made with the customer not the institution in mind.
Channel choice is customer-driven. Don’t look to migrate transactions to the lowest cost channel, but rather recognise that customers will be multi-channel. Give them the opportunity to resolve their transaction on their terms, make it simple, and intervene proactively when things go wrong.
Product design needs to evolve. Too often products are designed in isolation from the customer experience, or legacy products can’t be evolved to the needs of emerging segments. How long would it take you to push out a simple, execution-only product via social media channels?
Creating affinity to traditional brands can be hard. Be genuine, engage users on their terms and offer a service tailored to their needs. When a customer feels they have been the recipient of free, useful advice or information they are far more likely to return as a paying customer as well as advocate the company that provided it.
It won’t work if the organisation isn’t aligned. Virtually every organisation makes statements about being customer focused but few have really embodied this in how their people and leaders act and are motivated. One of the key practical steps is to consider how the customer is represented and embedded in all parts of the organisation.

The pace of change has taken many by surprise over the past decade; it has seen the erosion of the traditional boundaries and rules of engagement. However, far from fearing this change financial institutions should embrace it as a unique opportunity to listen, react and update their propositions and processes in line with what their customers want.

Peter Desouza

Peter is a Consultant in Sales and Distribution. He has 3 years’ experience of working predominantly within the retail banking sector on customer transformation projects. He has worked on defining customer journeys, customer value and segmentation, how to attract, interact and retain customers in the social era. Peter has also consulted on a range of start-ups in the social media and crowd funding space.

Connect with Peter on LinkedIn.