| The Promise and Peril of Proactive Outreach |
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bankerstuff Consumers are being trained to harbor sky-high expectations for timely, convenient, proactive information. Banks, with their rich data on customers, their full mix of channels, and their growing ability to integrate data and channels, can be skilled practitioners of this potent strategy, if they can avoid its risks.Waiting for the Customer to Call That is proactive outreach – and targeted cross-channel up-selling besides. A friend chose a large bank to apply for online banking and filled out contact, demographic, and financial information. When she got to the funding page she changed her mind and logged off. A month later, a crumpled postcard arrived from the bank – black and white, no bank logo, no message – just three boxes to check if the bank could help her with checking, savings, or other services, and an address to mail back the card. Poor branding, wrong channel, poor timing, wrong question. The Importance of Proactive Outreach That is a tall order, but it is being done so effectively by enough companies in various businesses that it has set a new standard. The standard is high. The medical insurance company has a medically trained agent call to ask if the patient’s medicine is working. A landscaper emails that it’s time to mulch again, how much mulch the customer used last year, and offering free delivery for another purchase. The car dealer leaves a voicemail saying it’s time for a service visit and come in tomorrow to get a loaner car. These proactive outreaches all powerfully say, “You are our customer, we value your business, we think this is what you need, and here is how we make it easy/attractive to deliver.” Whether they delight the customer or just take away a worry, they make the customer less likely to leave and more likely to buy. They box out the competitor who doesn’t have that tidbit of inside customer information. But proactive outreach must be executed well or it’s risky. Busy consumers value their downtime. They don’t appreciate most telemarketing calls or aggressive sales tactics. They don’t want a touch for the sake of the touch, only if it brings them value. The car dealer with the helpful reminders and loaner cars is the same one that leaves three voicemails after each service visit reminding the customer to go online and fill out a survey about the experience. That’s not proactive outreach; that’s a nuisance. The right channel for that inquiry was face-to-face, when the customer was paying and getting his car back. Nor is more outreach the answer. If the volume of outreach increases but its value does not, or if it comes through the wrong channel, it will not create loyalty or revenue and it might train the customer to ignore that provider. The proof is in the millions of phone numbers on the Do Not Call list and the miniscule returns on direct mail. Making it Work When banks integrate their traditional and non-traditional data, they can produce rich analytics for predicting needs not otherwise visible. When a local employer pays year-end bonuses, those people hear from furniture stores and car dealers; will they hear from their bank with financial advice and services? A material change in credit card usage should prompt a call asking about whether the card meets the customer’s needs. Same with customers who go through any life-changing event. They are in buy mode, they will buy from somebody, and they will be heavily influenced by who comes to them. The customer’s channel preference matters, not just because that’s the best way to reach that customer, but also because of all the additional information that customer’s channel choice implies about the customer. If customers have shown a preference for mail, it takes a personalized mailing: “Congratulation on your daughter’s graduation. Let us help you maintain your investing momentum while financing her secondary education.” If parents-to-be have shown in interest in mobile and are prospects for a home equity loan, a text about applying online might be in order. How Well Does Good Proactive Outreach Work? If people making decisions as important as their college education only give you five minutes to engage them, imagine how rapidly you can lose their attention on lesser matters – or those that matter more to you than to them. The friend above who opened the online banking account – what are the odds that a month later, when she finally heard from the bank, she had not already satisfied whatever need drove her to the site? Fast is whatever the customer considers timely. Proactive outreach can’t happen if technology impedes it. Today, in addition to analytics, other decisioning technology advances are making informed proactive outreach easier for banks. Technology limitations used to force call centers’ inbound and outbound agents into separate islands, unable to share information easily or to transfer customers and their information smoothly from one island to the other. Now those technologies are integrated, data fusion across disparate systems is efficient, analytics can be deployed in hours not months - and companies are finding the payoffs. For example, a web services company faced a challenge common to banks – many single service customers despite a good set of service offerings. It was the job of outbound agents to cross-sell, but before they could place calls, they had to manually research customers just to obtain information already in the hands of their inbound agent colleagues. The productivity impact was costly – skilled sales resources not engaged in sales, not holding customer conversations. So the company deployed new decisioning technology that integrated inbound and outbound agents, effectively making them a cohesive, information-driven working unit. Management could, instantly, upon signing up a new customer, provide the right information to the right agents so they could reach out as appropriate. The technology also enabled management to dynamically detect idle agents and quickly provide them with customer records teed up for a proactive outreach. That kind of technological fluency puts the “proactive” in front of outreach. This strategy boosted the company’s agent productivity by 10%. Without adding agent expense, they had 10% more resources devoted to highly productive outreach such as cross-selling new products and services, helping customers set up and activate new products, thanking customers for renewals, and resolving any payment issues. ________
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