Last November, President Clinton enacted the Financial Services Modernization
Act (FSMA), a law which reversed the way financial services firms had
marketed their products and services for the past 60 years. Few will feel
this law's impact more than customer contact centers, because they will
need to make sense of the additional sales offers that will come from
the increased amount of marketing by financial services firms.
FSMA eliminated the barriers that prohibited financial institutions from
marketing securities, insurance, credit cards and other financial products
under one roof. Previous, Depression-era thinking had assumed that economic
shocks could be minimized if there was more control over the multiple
lines of business of financial services firms.
With passage of the FSMA, consumers now have access to convenient, one-stop
shopping. But to financial services firms, the law dictates they must
adapt their marketing strategies to maximize their efforts across the
enterprise as a whole. They must now coordinate the activities for their
multiple lines of business to avoid bombarding customers with confusing
or conflicting offers. In addition, no longer can financial services firms
simply "target" the customers that always pay their bills, for
example, because the widespread increase in financial services marketing
results in a highly competitive marketplace. Clearly, a new approach to
marketing is needed --one that encompasses the firms' customer contact
center.
However, only a few customer contact centers have provisions in place
to accommodate this expected increase in marketing from the financial
services firms. This is surprising, considering a 1998 Meridien Research
report that cites a seven percent growth rate for customer contact centers,
which receive nearly eight billion calls a year from customers of financial
services institutions.
Helping Financial Service Firms And Customer Contact Centers Compete
Sky Alland, a Columbia, Maryland-based customer loyalty management
firm that operates 10 customer contact centers, has a strategy in place
to help its financial services clients handle the FSMA-induced increase
in business. Anticipating the need for these clients to improve their
marketing strategies and return on investment, Sky Alland entered into
a partnership with Dulles, Virginia-based MarketSwitch to incorporate
MarketSwitch's Real-Time Offer Optimizer into its customer-contact center
applications. Maintaining existing customers is more cost-effective than
finding new ones, so resources can be maximized when cross-selling is
optimized. This will be especially beneficial since Sky Alland expects
clients like American Express, Michigan National Bank, Fortis and First
USA to double the list of services they provide to customers.
According to Sky Alland CEO Rich Hebert, "In the last two months
of 1999, we experienced an increase in planning activity from our financial
services clients for 2000. They are organizing a more aggressive approach
to include cross-selling products in response to the expected intense
competition."
Sky Alland points to the optimization technology as an enabling factor
that helps it increase sales, the number of referrals and cash flows of
clients. In fact, the company's customer loyalty management life cycle
emphasizes the need to enhance customer service. Customer acquisition,
retention and optimization are the components encompassing their central
customer care database, but it is the optimization aspect that gives Sky
Alland an edge.
FSMA Shows The Need For Optimization
With optimization technology, marketing campaigns are customer-focused
instead of product-based. Campaigns must provide value to the consumer,
and to do so the customer contact centers must offer the most appropriate
products and services that meet each customer's needs. Is it reasonable
for customer contact associates to know which offer is most valuable to
the consumer from among the millions of offers available? With such a
short span of time to make the offer, the accuracy and ability of staff
to make the right offer and provide a high level of customer service is
minimal.
Optimization technology, according to Bill Bradway, research director
at Newton, Massachusetts-based Meridien Research, provides the means of
making personalized offers to market an appropriate service through one-to-one
direct marketing.
"There is value in having your bank provide additional services
such as securities, or your credit card company supplying mortgages. How
this additional service is offered, however, must provide value to the
customer and keeping customers on hold to figure out the right offer doesn't
help," explained Bradway. "The leading institutions strive to
present an optimized offer in real-time."
Technology has allowed customer contact centers to do just that. Although
the telephone remains the most personal way to communicate when building
relationships, the Internet has emerged as the most cost-effective means
to build and maintain these relationships. In addition to serving clients
by telephone, center associates can now incorporate the use of multiple
channels, responding to customer inquiries via the same channel by which
contact was initiated and enhancing their means of developing and maintaining
relationships.
Multichannel and multioffer optimization requires optimization of information
in the customer care database, a central part of the customer management
life cycle. Sky Alland's database includes transactional client data,
as well as interaction data from the dialogue with customers. These two
components are critical to determining appropriate and valuable sales
offers.
"Historically, customer contact centers have attempted to perform
back-end batch optimization, but that depended on the intelligence of
center associates," said Sky Alland's Hebert. "Now, technological
developments have given our representatives the tools they need to make
educated decisions as to which offer a customer should receive and when.
This technology will analyze the customer's history and inform the agent
of the appropriate offer to make, in real-time."
For example, an agent may have on the telephone a valued customer requesting
information about an account with a financial services institution. The
transaction and interaction data prompt the agent to ask a series of questions
which can assess the individual interests and needs of the customer. These
responses are recorded and become part of the database. Optimization software
analyzes these responses in real-time, so it can produce additional questions
for the agent to ask, if necessary. As a result, the technology develops
a model of the customer by scoring responses and suggests an offer for
the agent to make.
In addition to directing the responses of contact center agents, optimization
technology reduces the amount of contact necessary between the consumer
and the customer contact center. This can translate to more affordable
interaction costs for the centers, and customers are not overwhelmed with
solicitations of little or no value. Said Hebert, "The system will
do most of the work [for our associates], now they will just validate,
therefore enhancing their efficiency while providing customers with a
high level of service."
How Will This Higher Volume Play Out In Customer Contact Centers?
After passage of the FSMA, a special Meridien Research brief issued in
December 1999 reported that large financial institutions will begin planning
for increased marketing during mid-February or the end of March. However,
Sky Alland's Hebert noted that some of the company's clients began planning
before the end of 1999. While these firms' goal is to become more efficient
in marketing in the wake of the FSMA, they are in the minority.
Moreover, the Meridien report states retail financial services institutions
must deploy at least some of their top strategic initiatives in order
to maintain existing positioning and successfully become players in this
recently expanded and competitive industry. These initiatives include
improving the quality of customer databases, enhancing front-office selling
solutions and offering optimized campaign management that supports multichannel
inbound and outbound needs.
Corporate America knows it must solicit and market to consumers more
efficiently. The FSMA is forcing financial services companies to do it
now, and it provides an opportunity for customer contact center marketers
to help them through the process.
Suzanne Porter-Kuchay is director of marketing for MarketSwitch of
Dulles, Virginia. For more information, contact her at 703-444-6750 x253,
send an e-mail to [email protected]
or visit the company's Web site at www.marketswitch.com.
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