Giving Your Customer a Face
2001; American Bankers Association; Volume: 93; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0194-5947
Autores Tópico(s)Customer churn and segmentation
ResumoCustomer profiling can be effective, especially if you start out with small steps. Here's why Of all the maxims in banking, perhaps none is more spoken of than, Know thy customer. And yet for many reasons, the trek up the mountain of customer knowledge is a treacherous one. terms of their image of the customer, bankers tend to have a mosaic rather than a snapshot. More detailed awareness--the kind that could offer real insight into behavior, motive, and need--is a pipe dream for most. Still, many banks have made progress, even in the gawky aftermath of growth by merger and acquisition. Banks have caught on to the importance of having more detailed customer knowledge as a way to begin to own the customer and that's a start, says Paul Kowal, president of Kowal Associates in Boston. That the data has value and impacts the bottom line is acknowledged by most managers and has become a priority in many institutions, says Kowal. Bankers are even beginning to pay attention to how their institutions are perceived by customers, says Kowal. way, banks can respond to customer feedback and adjust their offers and methods. But before you can appreciate such subtleties or become otherwise sophisticated by mining data to discover customer preference, you need to get started. This means building solid customer profiles. At its root, this practice involves the collection of data about customers from the mundane name and address to the more revealing income, job, education, channel preferences, and habits, according to John Christensen, managing director, northeast region, Access Data Corp., Pittsburgh, and a former customer relationship management executive with both IBM and Siebel Systems. Access Data provides e-CRM services as an application service provider (ASP) and does consulting work with banks on CRM initiatives. I don't think you need to implement an expensive CRM system right away, Christensen says, in accordance with others interviewed for the article. In fact, getting one without having built a solid collection of profiles would be getting ahead of yourself. Christensen jokes that many CRM systems get installed in the hopes of selling everything to everybody and solving world hunger. Despite impressive sums spent, the results are typically modest or lacking, but not because CRM is a misguided concept. You need to start small and roll out your initiative by degrees, Christensen explains. A clean customer profile is necessary for more reasons than one. It helps banks to launch ambitious cross-channel projects that micro-segment and target-market, among other things. If the ultimate goal is lifecycle marketing, that is, proactively making offers to the customer based on his or her financial requirements at different life stages, the means is careful bookkeeping, observation, and action on the front line. To do that first requires inputting basic household data into a database that is accessed and regularly used by appropriate members of the organization. You have to figure out how to get the information into the hands of the people who touch the customers, says Christensen. True, the data collected is static, that is, accurate as of the time of inputting but not necessarily accurate 30 days later. Still, consolidating data into simple records is a start. Big CRM ventures--the sort that capture transaction data and link to sales automation systems--are one way to derive a detailed customer picture. However, they have an expense and complexity that may not be required or justified by the campaigns the bank wishes to do. Further, they collect historic data that may not offer good predictive indicators. And that is the most important point to consider before profiling, at least to Rainer Famulla, a partner with Accenture based in Washington, D.C. Before you even start to gather customer data, peg costs to a customer, or analyze customer need, you have to outline your business objectives, says Famulla. …
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