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Customer value propositions are changing – and not all businesses are standing up and taking note. Against this backdrop, some predict that major financial services (and other) brands in Australia could fall, not due to trading scandals or liquidity issues, but because they simply fail to deliver value in line with changing customer expectation (think, retail …). So what’s the financial services sector doing about it?
Engaging with customers and potential customers is the key to success – and the most efficient way to engage with large customer groups is digitally. Speakers at Sydney’s recent Digital Financial Services Conference offered some useful suggestions and examples of how.
Moven is an app that aims to help people ‘spend, save and live smarter’ by tracking spending and saving patterns. Alex Sion, President and Managing Director of Moven, saw a white space that banks were not filling adding overall value to the consumer rather than making money per se. The result? In touching on many different aspects customers’ lives, offers more opportunities for engagement than simple transactional bank apps. Sion says that features of the app such as “gamification” or making its functional elements ‘fun’ to ‘play’ or use, help reinforce the users positive feelings about the positive choices they make around their finances.
In February this year, Australian owned ME Bank launched Australia’s first Workplace Banking Kiosk at Telstra’s contact centre in Melbourne’s CBD. Rather than the old school way, ME Bank decided to reach out to its audiences where they already are rather than waiting for customers to come to them. Video phones operating in the kiosks combined face-to-face and digital banking as well as addressing the difficulty many people have finding time to go to their bank. According to Rocky Scopellitti, Telstra’s National General Manager of Financial Services, the initiative not only makes life easier for ME Bank’s Telstra employee customers, increasing engagement and loyalty, but also helps ME Bank improve efficiency.
When Barclaycard questioned how it could increase customer engagement and differentiate itself from the pack, the answer was Barclaycard Ring, billed as the world’s first ‘community-designed credit card’. The aim of this exercise was to enable customers and other stakeholders to ‘build’ their own credit card product, and in so doing provide them with complete transparency. Customers (or members) receive annual reports and in-depth information about the company’s profit and loss as well as the opportunity to influence company decisions with feedback and ideas. This initiative helped drive customer retention up 25% compared with typical programs and decreasing customer complaints by 50%.
So what can we learn from these examples?
It is important that each business starts by looking at what its target audience is looking for and how it might deliver on that demand in a way that’s relevant, fills a real need and will be appreciated and understood – in other words, in a way that delivers value. From there, it’s all about distribution: how to relay the value (or product or service) most effectively. If a business can nail those two questions, it’s a long way toward standing up and being counted as part of the digital revolution rather than a remnant of days past.
