DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 25)

ﬁnancial services. Over the past year, the ability to determine an account balance or view statement items, essentially PC banking tasks, has been announced for mobile with great fanfare. It has even led to the nine-ﬁgure sale of an early mobile banking vendor. But what have we really accomplished? No competent practitioner in the ﬁeld would claim that a mobile phone, with its drastically limited human interface, is any serious threat to the PC as a ﬁnancial management tool. And what of the ability to see your account balance anywhere, at anytime? It is hard to conceive of consumers walking through their daily lives thankful for the option to perform basic banking or bill payment at the drop of a hat. In fact, non-voice use statistics clearly indicate that consumers are mostly thankful their phones have the ability to entertain them. The dullness of banking may be a truism, but certainly no one looks for fun there. So what of mobile? For those organizations looking to enhance their customer relationships, it is better to give than to receive. That is, we should look to push information to our customers when circumstances dictate, not try to pull them into using their phones like a PC. Mobility has been made manifest by small computational devices that are always with us and always on. Those of us in data and decisionoriented businesses can now involve our customers in temporally meaningful ways. Situation and resolution can be made coincident, or nearly so. difﬁculties caused by the delay. In both cases, the airlines require a timely response from the customer; it is the very reason for alerting them via mobile. There are many possible applications of this idea to ﬁnancial services, some of which are accomplished, inefﬁciently, via other means today. One example concerns alerting a cardholder to the fraudulent use of his or her credit card. As a rule, issuers would rather inquire as to the legitimacy of a particular charge directly with a customer instead of declining it at the point of sale. Unfortunately, there has not existed a reasonable means of doing so until now. Another example is with impending deadlines for bill payment. One of the fastest-growing remittance transactions is online debit, employed without PIN, to make an immediate or expedited payment. The STAR System ATM and POS network makes such a transaction available to billers, allowing their customers to make payments over the phone or Internet for bills due now. The transaction is so popular among certain demographics that billers have been able to surcharge customers for the privilege. Of course, if you do not know your bill is due today, an expedited payment is of little value. However, in conjunction with an alert, the value is indeed obvious. Connecting With Our Customers the Right Way The Customer-Centric Mobile Model Two models have emerged that demonstrate this very idea. Already widely used in the airline industry, notiﬁcations and alerts involve customers with current information when that involvement is of greatest value. Notiﬁcations, in particular, provide information to customers that is timely, personal and not directly actionable. For instance, airlines routinely inform their customers via SMS or other mobile means that an upgrade has cleared. The information is timely in that it reaches the customer while he or she is likely to be directly involved in the information’s context, such as getting ready to head to the airport a few hours before departure. It is personal in that the upgrade is of direct importance to the customer. It is not information that has broad, undifferentiated meaning to a large number of people. Finally, an upgrade does not expect, nor require, a response from the customer. Why notify a customer of an upgrade? First class awaits, regardless of the prior awareness of the fact. As it happens, airlines notify because of that prior awareness. Knowledge that, for the next ﬁve hours, I will be enjoying a free cocktail while stretching my legs and advancing my elbows, opposed to having my knees in my face, is pleasant knowledge indeed and very likely to improve my countenance and my afﬁnity to the carrier. The same applies to ﬁnancial services: Knowledge the check has cleared, the bill has been paid or the order has shipped imparts a peace of mind, no small value when it comes to people and their money. Alerts are the same as notiﬁcations, with the addition that they require action. The action is expected either inside or outside the mobile channel. Again, airlines show us the way with gate change and ﬂight delay alerts. The former requires action outside of the mobile channel: walking to the new gate while abandoning the old. The latter may require action within the channel if an option to take a different ﬂight is coincidentally offered as a means of resolving If we are able, then, to reject (or at least resist) the model of the PC, how should we approach these mobile devices that penetrate at least 80% of the population and, therefore, are likely to be in our customers’ hands? Consider the following: >> Can we positively inﬂuence a customer’s state of mind? Where in the life cycle of interactions with our customers can we provide timely and personal information that will beneﬁt them? It is important that all three of these conditions be satisﬁed. Missing even one can cause a notiﬁcation to devolve into an unwelcome annoyance, as many email notiﬁcations have become and are now rightly considered by consumers to be “spam.” >> Is there a decision or piece of information we need from the customer soon in order to serve them better or delight them? If we can keep our customer from stepping into a hole, they will be all the more thankful for it. We can expand the idea further to offers for sale, assuming as we do that a customer will beneﬁt from our product. But we must be very careful. Telemarketing has so ruined outbound telephony as a legitimate customer communication tool in banking that it is hardly used today. It didn’t take long for Bell and Edison to see the rise of the exchange as the central value proposition and business model for telephony. The same will surely be true for early adopters in mobile. Recently, Citibank announced that although it came out of the gate strongly with a mobile solution that hearkened to PC banking, it is now partnering with SK Telecom to broaden its approach. For the rest of us that must make as good a decision as possible the ﬁrst time around, alerts and notiﬁcations give us the opportunity to leverage mobile for what is: a powerful new way to reach our customers with something they’ll want to hear. Roger W. Applewhite is the technology strategist at Avenue B Consulting, Inc., a management consulting ﬁrm focusing on payment systems products, services and technologies. For more information, email him at roger.applewhite@avenuebconsulting.com or visit www.avenuebconsulting.com. ■ www.DOCUMENTmedia.com april.08 document 25 http://www.avenuebconsulting.com http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

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