4 Steps to Become a Customer-Centric Financial Institution

These days, financial institutions must look past the cash and focus their customers. According to Standard Bank’s Sandeep Deobhakta, here are four key steps banks should take to achieve customer centricity.

1. Listen - The first step in the journey toward customer centricity is for business leaders to listen to what their customers are saying. This allows organizations to get an understanding of their customers' needs and these insights can be used to ensure that all communications are tailored to individual customers.

2. Steer Away From Product Centricity – Instead of focusing on the profitability of products. use insights gathered from Voice of Customer (VOC) endeavors to move away from being product-centric and put customers at the core of business. According Deobhakta, business leaders need to think in terms of what customers require to be successful in different facets of their lives. Banks that understand this principle are in a better position to ensure that their products fit well within the customer journey.

3. Address the Data Conundrum - Financial institutions are collecting large amounts of customer data both from transactions and interactions with staff. However, many organizations are still facing challenges in turning this data into actionable insights. A major hurtle lies in information silos that need to be bridged in order to give decision-makers a single view of the customer. One way to do this is to have a robust data platform that brings together data from different repositories, and is instrumental in helping banks identify customer needs and engage with them on a personalized basis, said Deobhakta.

4. Be Culture Sensitive - Organizations need to understand the varying nuances that make them tick. Understanding culture is an important part of Standard Bank's strategy and this reflects in the core banking platform that the bank has deployed across the African continent. The organization understands that while customers' foundational needs are similar, their actions are likely to be dictated by demographic influences, and the bank has adapted its system to reflect country specific regulations and social nuances.

Financial services organizations need to understand that being seen as a customer-centric organization is not solely a positive marketing strategy. This is a sound investment which affects products and services offerings, sales process and distribution, infrastructure, as well as ongoing customer treatment which will lead to more satisfied customers. Then they will be likely to remain loyal to the brand.

Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist at IIR USA, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the tech industry.  She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmanadCicc. 

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How to get more ideas from your customers

Getting more ideas from your customers: “We need just one more idea to reach our goal”!

One way to get customers to contribute ideas to your challenge is to let them know you almost have the number of ideas you are shooting for.

A key part of a successful collaborative innovation strategy is to make certain you communicate the team’s successes.  It is a terrific way to let customers know their efforts are being rewarded.  Armed with this knowledge those customers who collaborate gain enthusiasm for continuing to provide contributions.

So although it may seem like a small thing...

...showing off or reporting the progress your customers are making (toward the number of ideas you’ve set as your goal) will spur additional ideas and participation.

You know that big poster of a thermometer on the village square that notes the progress of the fund raising project?  Well it seems that works. 

Customers are more likely to contribute when the goals are close to being reached.

This means I should give you two pieces of advice when launching your idea challenge to customers... 

          1.      Shoot for an attainable target number of ideas

          2.     Raise the goal as the challenge progresses

Celebrate Quick Wins

Celebrating victories, accomplishments and milestones with your customers in the Innovation process is an important step in demonstrating a senior level company endorsement of the notion “we’re interested in what you have to say, Mr./Mrs. Customers”. 

By stopping to celebrate progress, to recognize a given customer’s accomplishments and reflect on the work completed thus far, it is also possible to evaluate the overall Innovation effort and course correct, if necessary.

You can communicate the progress of the challenge; the number of ideas “achieved” so far by posting a progress chart on the customer feedback portal dashboard, by sending out a daily, weekly, or a monthly newsletter or by sending an email directly to the customer contributors noting the progress everyone has made to date. 

In conclusion

When you ask Customers for ideas, set a goal of an attainable number of ideas for the challenge.  Raise the goal number of ideas as the challenge progresses.  Communicate the progress of the challenge to the customer contributor community.

Cryder, C. et al., “Goal Gradient in Helping Behavior,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (forthcoming).

Ron Shulkin blogs, researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on social media, innovation, voice of the customer, marketing automation and enterprise feedback management.  You can learn more about Ron at his biography web site:www.shulkin.net. You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.   

Ron Shulkin is Vice President of the Americas for CogniStreamer®, an innovation ecosystem. CogniStreamer serves as a Knowledge Management System, Idea Management System and Social Network for Innovation. CogniStreamer has been rated as a “Leader” in Forrester’s recent Wave report on Innovation Management Tools. You can learn more about CogniStreamer here http://bit.ly/ac3x60 . Ron also manages The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (JoinHere).

Treat Your Customer Like Your Date

Today, businesses spend a ton of resources attracting new customers without an understanding of what it takes to sustain a positive customer experience (CX). In fact, surveys reveal 80 percent of companies believe they deliver superior CX, yet only eight percent of their customers agree. If you take your significant other out on a date, do you dress like a slob and ignore them? Not if you want the relationship to continue – just as you do with your customer.

According to Daryl Travis, author, "How Does It Make You Feel?" and CEO, Brandtrust, in order to create a great CX it’s essential to have an understanding of experiences that trigger the emotions that drive your customer’s brand preference. Travis recently shared some tips with Retail Customer Experience on how business can use emotion to create a better CX.

How Your Customers Feel

According to psychologists, what people remember about a CX is determined by the intensity of emotions created in specific moments—not the overall experience. “This is true for most experiences throughout our lives. Our non-conscious mind categorizes and catalogues experiences according to the nature and intensity of emotions,” writes Travis.

When processing new stimuli, the non-conscious mind associates past memories and responds emotionally before rational thought occurs. When neurologists discovered that 95 percent of thought, emotion and learning occur this way, behavioral economists realized non-consious emotional responses shaped by past memories determine customer attitudes and behavior—not conscious, rational decisions.

Leverage Emotional Insights to Build Trust

Travis says that when considering CX, it’s important to be mindful that trust and faith are essential emotions. When customers perceive your company as trustworthy, they buy your products. Demonstrating trustworthiness can be done when a situation is negative as well.  Trustworthiness is demonstrated by being reliable and concerned for your customer’s needs. The company must demonstrate that it will always act in a caring way toward the customer, no matter the circumstances.

Build empathy

Even though budgets are limited, it’s important to invest in a deep understanding of your customer. With this clarity, teams are able to focus, certain that what they are doing matters to their customers. This is where empathy building can help. It’s also important for senior leadership to understand what customers experience throughout their daily lives. This often shifts how they look at their business, sparking fresh thinking in an empathetic understanding of customers.

Internalize the CX

For an initiative to succeed in improving the CX, senior leadership needs to “live” the brand. This involves articulating the brand promise internally so that people understand what is expected. Each aspect of delivering a positive CX needs to be “caught, not taught,” according to Travis. Leaders intent on changing employee behavior must do so by exemplifying the vision for how the brand is to be experienced. By sharing an understanding of the emotional drivers for a positive CX, it’s possible to refocus employees around what works. Applied social science research has demonstrated that emphasizing the positive rather than trying to eliminate the negative is effective in improving an organization’s capacity for change.

Implement a Plan

Finally, it’s necessary for a work plan to be undertaken to facilitate acceptance and adoption of the behaviors necessary to bring the vision and values of the new CX to life throughout the organization. This process will help to transcend ambiguities and inspire colleagues to internalize and live the new experience promise.

Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist at IIR USA in New York City, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the tech industry.  She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc. 

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7 Principles of the Social Customer

The digital age and its explosion of social media has changed the customer’s buying cycle. With it came the rise of a new kind of customer—one that has been known to shake up even the most respected brands, known as the “Social Customer.” The Social Customer is every man, woman and child that is an active participant of social media – which is in about 1.4 billion people. The voice of the Social Customer has proved to be so powerful that it has created social media mayhem for companies from small to large.

According to Mobile Youth, here are the seven principles of the Social Customer, which provide new insights for customer experience and consumer behavior:

1) Social Motivations, Not Social Media

If we want to understand the Social Customer, we must first understand their motivation. Social motivation reveals why trends happen. It’s easy to look at social media as the answer but simply making media “social” doesn’t make it more social.

2) Social by Design

Our two most basic social needs are the need to belong and the need to be significant. When unable to feel belonging and significance, we experience negative emotions often resorting to what, appears to the observer, irrational behavior but in reality has a more logical underpinning in the Social Code –which is every interaction from communication to how and why we buy.

3) Offline Beats Online

Even in the digital age, face to face communication remains king. While this generation may be comfortable with modern communication technology, technology is a means not an end.

4) The Disconnected Generation Wants More Relationships

The Disconnected Generation care more about the inefficiencies of daily life because these inefficiencies are the meaning they seek. The basic interaction and social fabric of our lives afforded to previous generations is being lost and youth are leading the charge to reclaim these basic privileges through the products they buy.

5) 90% of Communication is Passive

Consumer psychology shows how much of our social meaning is communicated through mundane behaviors. Just because we don’t see it or it doesn’t appear obvious doesn’t mean that it’s meaningless. When parents walk into the back room and see their teen children “hanging out” with friends they are often perplexed by how unproductive this behavior is.

6) Everything is Social

Years of mobile industry research into how young people use smartphones highlights how everything is a Social Tool. People don’t buy stuff, they buy what stuff does for them. The mobile phone is a powerful social tool, but not the only one available.

7) The More You Track the Social Customer, the Less You Understand

If you want to better understand buying behavior, we can’t rely on more data. Insights come from an emotional connection that evades the transparent world of Big Data. Students send pictures of themselves making funny faces, sticking out their tongues or virtual doodles made from the back of classmate’s heads. And that means, Big Data misses out because it can’t track what’s not shared in the public domain.

Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist at IIR USA in New York City, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the tech industry.  She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc. 

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Arguments for and against deploying a collaborative social network

Here's the debate:  

• Must we have a social network for collaboration at work?  
• How about with your customers?

On one hand we want everyone’s opinion.  We appreciate that our employees and our customers have information we should collect and synthesize.  But naysayers will always point out why this premise either won’t work or that the information is unreliable.

There are always those folks within a company who are steadfastly against encouraging the use of a social network within a company.  They think their employees should be paying attention to their “day jobs”, not frittering away their time surfing the web.  It’s not that they can’t see the benefit of having workers talk to each other or with customers…they just believe this time is misspent. 

This is not a new notion.  That same complaint used to be made about coffee houses even though great ideas came out of these meeting places.  In the 1600’s Anthony Wood, an Oxford academic noted, “Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the University?” he asked. “Answer: Because of Coffea Houses, where they spend all their time.”  

The smartest people of the time congregated at coffee houses to extend the discussions began at meetings of the Members of the Royal Society, England’s pioneering scientific society.  So too can collaborative social networks provide a place for ongoing collaboration in between episodic events.  You can have a big meeting, and then continue the discussion via a social setting.

Like coffee houses of the past, social networks can provide a lively social and intellectual environment, giving rise to a stream of innovations that can shape the world. We still consider coffee as the official drink of collaboration and networking (at least before 5PM).

The path of using a social network to collaborate at work requires our brains to work differently.  Some studies have shown it will take you 23 minutes to get back on track after posting a status line on either twitter or Facebook and that a social media interruption occurs every 10.5 minutes on average, and people waste 41% of that time on Facebook. Yet, a study published in 2012 by McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm, found that the use of social networking within companies increased the productivity of “knowledge workers” by 20 to 25 percent.

The notion of workers collaborating on line might be inevitable.  A survey by virtual office staffing agency Intelligent Office finds that more and more employees are choosing where they want to work, rather than being assigned a standard workplace location. Specifically, 70% of the employees surveyed work from alternate locations on a regular basis.  You can’t have all your meetings at work if everyone works someplace different.

 

Here’s another reason why a social network dedicated to collaboration is inevitable.   Most employees spend about a quarter of their time managing e-mail.  They spend about one day of the work week looking for internal information or tracking down the right people. With internal social networks, the message IS the content.  You can find the co-worker you need easily (even if you’ve never met). 

If you can have a central repository of information; of content, employees’ time (spent looking for the information they need) can be cut by a third.

And adoption might be inevitable also because it appears the speed and scale of adoption exceeds other technologies.

One danger the collaborative social network presents is when one voice is worth more than others.  The idea to encourage democracy is a constant challenge.   Just like in ancient Rome, when someone important recommended a book (and had the resources to have scribes make copies), executives today can approve content and tacitly encourage support for any given idea.

The initial promise of social media was to help ideas succeed on their own.  It was thought these open forums would remove the old gatekeepers.  In fact social media is not especially democratic. The most powerful people and institutions have the most Facebook fans and Twitter followers which means that content that serves their interests is much more likely to show up in your newsfeed.

The conclusions to be drawn?  Social networks dedicated to collaborative ideation appear to be inevitable.  Methods to keep the process democratic must be part of the deployment strategy.  It takes more than just rolling out a new social network ideation tool…a strategy for nurturing a culture ripe for collaboration must be encouraged.

TOM STANDAGE,  NY Times, June 22, 2013

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - The First 2,000 Years By TOM STANDAGE

Ron Shulkin blogs researches and writes about enterprise technology focused on social media, innovation, voice of the customer, marketing automation and enterprise feedback management.  You can learn more about Ron at his biography web site:www.shulkin.net. You can follow him Twitter. You can follow his blogs at this Facebook group.  You can connect with Ron on LinkedIn.  

 

Ron Shulkin is Vice President of the Americas for CogniStreamer®, an innovation ecosystem. CogniStreamer serves as a Knowledge Management System, Idea Management System and Social Network for Innovation. You can learn more about CogniStreamer here http://bit.ly/ac3x60 . Ron manages The Idea Management Group on LinkedIn (JoinHere).

How to Create Made-to-Order Customer Experience

Welcome to the world that will not wait, where each customer service interaction is driven by the "me" mentality. According to Google's "The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior," the average consumer moves among three screens per day to search for information and perform tasks. In addition to potentially being multiscreen, customer service transactions are also often multichannel, performed across a varying combination of platforms including but not limited to phone, email, chat, social media, smartphone, or tablet. An Ovum study of more than 8,000 consumers shows that 74 percent now use at least three channels when interacting with an enterprise for customer-related issues—and this approach to resolution is completely changing the way support communicates with customers. The consumer is now in control, demanding service anytime, anywhere, via the channel of his or her choice. Therefore, many big brands have brought back the structure of single-file service by making certain customer support contact information less accessible and siphoning customers through one or two more cost-effective channels like email or live chat. But between the bloggers, the media, and the public outcry on social media, these could not contain consumers who demanded a made-to-order customer experience based on expectations. So, how does a brand master all the combinations? Destination CRM has shared some insightful answers: Offer as many customer service channels as possible. Expectations of today's customer are for service at least via phone, email, and online support portal. Additional channels that prove to be customer service differentiators include live chat, self-service knowledge base, mobile, social media, and video. Embrace agile channeling. While an organization may offer a variety of customer service channels, you'll increasingly frustrate customers if they're not connected. More and more customers are expecting service and support to be agile. They want service to start an interaction at one point, whether that's phone or email or help desk, and the brand should be able to carry over that information and continue the conversation as the customer arrives at the next touch point. Know thy customer. Locked hand in hand with agile channeling is the personalized customer experience. Without aggregated data, information, and feedback from across all channels, you will never have a true 360-degree view of the customer to create a made-to-order customer experience. With a new generation of customers demanding more and reaching out and voicing their opinions across more channels, brands can only contain the empowered consumer with siloed channels for so long. Customers have figured out their own way to put themselves first. Amanda Ciccatelli, Social Media Strategist at IIR USA in New York City, has a background in digital and print journalism, covering a variety of topics in business strategy, marketing, and technology. She previously worked at Technology Marketing Corporation as a Web Editor where she covered breaking news and feature stories in the tech industry.  She can be reached at aciccatelli@iirusa.com. Follow her at @AmandaCicc.

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