Banks and bankers took a beating as a result of the recent financial crisis and recession. That beating wasn’t reserved for large Manhattan banks. Smaller community banks and regionals were painted with the same brush as the one used for those who nearly broke our global financial system – customers believed that bankers no longer understood or cared about them. They thought bankers were out of touch with Main Street and couldn’t be trusted.
Today, bankers get the message and want to do something about it. But, what? What can you do to change a customer’s mind? How can you reengage with your customer and build a broader customer base? One way, says Jill Enabnit, Vice President of Market Information and Research at US Bank, is to move the analytic culture and the sales culture closer together.
Customers in many industries, not just banking, can be heard complaining that the customer is less important than the profit. Enabnit says US Bank uses analytics to get a holistic view of how each customer interacts with the bank. She says this move has improved the customer experience. “It’s not always about selling the customer another product,” says Enabnit. “It’s about getting them into the right product.” According to Enabnit, US Bank uses SAS to mine up to 17 million transactions each day. Those transactions are analyzed and the results are presented on a custom dashboard called BLAST (Banker Leads, Alerts, and Sales Tool). If something changed in a customer’s financial life during the day – they deposited a significant amount of money, closed an account, made an unusual purchase – a frontline banker could decide if a call or response from the bank should occur. These one-on-one triage responses are complementary to US Bank’s traditional customer relationship marketing.
US Bank has been using analytics for customer intelligence since 2004. Now they are expanding those analytical strategies to their multi-channel areas of Internet and mobile banking. “We need to recognize that our customers want to use those channels to have the equivalent of a conversation,” says Enabnit. “How can we enable that within our organization and make it work for what the customers’ needs are?”
Readers, are you using analytics to improve your customer relationships? Have you seen an uptick in cross-sell as a result of your efforts?
