Ask:
New Auto
LoAN?
Ask: IRA
opeNINg?
Note:
BIRthdAy
todAy
BY DeB Stewart
New Frontline Service
and Sales Tool
Photograph © 2012 ThinkStock.com
When a customer makes a transaction with a teller, the technology
links to the bank’s CRM and identifies a likely cross-sell
opportunity or relevant service message, prompting
the teller with a sales message or script.
F
act: 85 to 90 percent of the customers who walk into your branches todaywill head straight to the teller line. During their visit,
most will interact only with a teller and possibly no other bank
person-nel—for months at a time.
So as you look at your challenges for 2012—replacing lost revenue, retaining and growing existing customer share-of-wallet, ensuring a consistent and delightful customer experi-ence, migrating customers to lower-cost services—you might conclude that what happens during that teller transaction will have a huge impact on your success.
And that’s why more and more banks are investing in a teller tool such as frontline messaging, commonly referred to as “pop-up technology.”
Clues about customers
“Frontline messaging . . . provides an effective way to get knowledge about a customer’s sales or service needs from marketing or operations support to the front line,” explains Curt Johnson, director of product management for CRM and business intelligence solutions for Open Solutions Inc., Glastonbury, Conn. Simply, pop-ups provide a clue to front-line staff (tellers, platform, call center) to present a targeted product offer or service message to the customer they are servicing. This solution recognizes that tellers’ time is limited and that their focus is on service quality, not on selling. It provides tellers with quality leads and personalized messag-ing that are simple to deliver and enhance the quality of their customer interaction.
From a technology perspective, pop-ups link your CRM to one or more of your core processing systems (teller, plat-form, call center). “This is not a net new process, but rather a refinement of the referral processes you have in place to-day,” notes David Acevedo, vice president and national sales director of inBusiness Services Inc., Nashville, Tenn. “It is getting timely, precise referral clues from your CRM to your
frontline associates while providing a mechanism to ensure a more consistent customer experience.”
“Pop-ups provide a way for your frontline staff members to participate in and execute the strategic vision of your company,” explains Johnson. “Whether it’s creating a consistent customer experience, cross-selling or fulfilling on a regulatory change, this technology helps to support excellence in execution.”
Here are some of the ways that pop-up technology is being used as integrated campaign support in banks:
Cross-selling to a lower-cost service option
As part of an integrated campaign strategy, tellers can provide follow-up to a direct mail or email that a customer has received. Jason Tonioli, vice president marketing for Bank of Utah (as-sets: $750 million) Ogden, Utah, provides examples of how this process is supported on the bank’s Smart Pops platform.
1. Identifying the lead. When customer John Smith comes into the bank to make a deposit into his checking account, the teller begins processing the transaction by entering his account number into the bank’s teller software. The pop-up technology monitors each of these inputs. In this case, John’s name was on the e-statement cross-sell target list. The software recognizes the sales opportunity created by the CRM and a pop-up window immediately flashes onto the teller’s monitor with the message or script generated by the marketing department.
Practical tips on Implementing a Pop-Up technology Initiative
“M
ost banks begin pop-up implementation with a small number of their branches,” says David Ace-vedo, vice president and national sales director of inBusiness Services Inc., Nashville, Tenn. “This lets them test training approaches, pop-up topics, any linkage to incentive and other key considerations prior to rollout. Many begin with a simple service-oriented topic like collecting email addresses to build teller familiarity and confidence.”Others, Johnson suggests, begin with a high-priority initiative such as the opt-in initiative described in the main article. Here are other implementation tips:
m Continue to learn about the customer—add “no mes-sage” flag capability to customers who are not receiving the messages well.
m Limit your total number of messages to around 20 per year—this ensures that staff can be properly trained and reflects average number of visits made by custom-ers at most banks.
Drive to make every element of the program relevant and measurable to ensure that the sales force believes in the value of the technology. If you do it wrong, the staff will back away.
Pop-ups provide a way for your frontline staff members to participate in and execute the strategic vision of your company.
an anniversary of a banking relationship are simple ways to let customers know that you value their relationship. “It lets your customers know that you are aware of details about them—letting you touch them in a personal way with little effort or scripting,” says Acevedo. These are also simple ways to acquaint customers with the use of pop-ups as the technology is introduced.
Support of service changes is also effectively done with this technology. Johnson notes, “One of our clients used pop-ups as the primary follow-up to an opt-out mailing to customers with high debit-card usage. They encouraged these clients to convert to their courtesy-pay feature as new regulations were implemented—this resulted in a 45 percent acceptance rate, far exceeding their expectations.”
“Another simple use is to have your frontline staff verify that all of the customer’s mobile phone, email address and other information is correct. We looked at the process of data verification used when you visit the doctor—and thought it made sense to do the same with our customers at least once a year,” Tonioli notes. “Using Smart Pops we were able to update contact information for 578 customers in 2011. And the great thing about the pop-up is that once an employee responds to the pop-up, it won’t reappear—avoiding repeat asks of the customer.”
Real results
Bank of Utah had 80 employees using pop-up software during their first year of implementation. Employees opened a total of 4,345 products as a result of the referrals sent through the
2. acting on the lead. The teller can choose to offer the service at that time or hit “snooze” and save the lead for another visit. When the offer is made, the customer either “accepts” (thumbs up) or “declines” (thumbs down). With an “accept,” the teller can either help the customer with additional information about the e-statements on the spot, or enter simple information to be forwarded to a product expert to complete the steps necessary to service the customer request.
3. Selling the product. That product expert will com-municate with John either at the branch or via phone. If he decides to convert to e-statements, and the necessary account modifications are made, the bank CRM system’s referral-tracking process recognizes that the e-statements were added, and it will send an email to the teller com-municating the successful sale.
4. Measuring results. Because the referral is generated within the system, referral reports are available to track all activity by employee, branch and region. The bank can create incentives to reward profitable sales behaviors by staff.
Product sales
Denise Salyards, marketing director for Totalbank (assets: $2 billion), Miami, suggests IRA season as a great time for an integrated push with direct marketing and pop-ups. “By asking customers who had received an IRA mailing if they had made their IRA contribution this year, we were able to not only invigorate our contributory IRA business but also we were pleasantly surprised to see a large number of IRA rollovers.”
Johnson’s clients have seen similar success in auto lend-ing. “Simple follow-ups to auto lending direct mail or online messages has seen significant success in 2011, with referrals going immediately to the proper referral channel. With auto lending demand expected to continue into 2012, we anticipate continued success in this product category.”
‘Next product’ predictors
Outside of the context of integrated marketing, banks are using predictive models to anticipate “best” products to offer a customer during a transaction. These predictions can be based on demographics, profitability, segmentation, current product usage—any data that your CRM holds.
Identification of affinity program membership may pro-vide the opportunity for up-sell. “I see that you’re at our gold level—did you know that if you bring $1,000, you will move to platinum?” Sharing this institutional knowledge of the customer is key—helping to answer the question: What kind of a customer is in front of me?
Service/ building customer satisfaction
# Referrals
Internet Banking
275
E-Statement 344
Mortgage 106
Merchant Services
59
Total Referrals
4,072
Total Products Opened
1,524
2011 Referral Highlights
This information is from Bank of Utah (assets:
$750 million), Ogden, Utah; 13 branch locations.
If a bank is struggling with the decision to implement a CrM, this is probably one of the best ways to make a case for implementing a CrM or MCIF at your bank.
software, equating to 54.3 products sold per employee. Tonioli explains, “When you start out, you are able to get a lot of easy sales or what I consider low-hanging fruit. There are always plenty of opportunities to sell, but over time, you’ll work through a lot of the easy cross-sell opportunities.
“During the first year we were able to sign a lot of custom-ers up for debit cards, online banking, and e-statements. In a lot of ways, the first few years are the easiest years. Our ROI on referrals closed with pop-ups during the first year was so high that we were able to measurably show that we had covered 100 percent of our CRM installation costs and the cost of the pop-up technology.
Providing pop-up information on customer birthdays or an anniversary of a banking relationship are simple ways to let customers know that you value their relationship.
“If a bank is struggling with the decision to implement a CRM, this is probably one of the best ways to make a case for implementing a CRM or MCIF at your bank. If you are struggling to make your CRM or MCIF work, you should definitely look at the pop-up technology solutions on the market.
“We’ve continued to have great success over the past few years but we’re always learning to do things better. In 2011, we were able to generate 4,072 referrals for a total of 1,524 opened products from those referrals. (Some of the bank’s highlights from 2011 are shown on the chart on the previous page.)
“We’ve used pop-ups for several years now and learned that it is a tool to help your sales people. It doesn’t replace training and isn’t intended to turn an employee into a robot that reads a script. Creating a sales culture and training employees to help customers is an ongoing effort. Pop-up technology is intended to help the employee identify needs that they might not have thought about talking to their customer about.”
What’s next?
Looking into the future, Johnson ex-pects that “event-based and business-intelligence-based messaging will grow as bank’s CRM sophistication continues to develop. Post-messaging profiling analytics will continue to develop—these systems will produce better and better results as we learn from each program. Pop-ups for per-sonal bankers as a part of the account opening and servicing processes will become more common and provide additional impact. The bottom line is that the more tightly these systems work in the overall marketing eco-system the more effective they will become—and the more empowered your branch staff will feel.” n
About the Author
DeB Stewart of Charlotte, N.C., is an independent consul-tant working for the financial services industry. Telephone: (704) 759-1633; email: [email protected].
This is a sample pop-up message prompting the teller to question the customer about a possible upcoming car purchase. Note the customer information on the left. The teller can input whether the customer accepts or declines the cross-sell or hit the “snooze” button to question the customer again during a future transaction.
This pop-up is a sample service prompt. The teller is directed to ask the customer if he or she would like to sign up for e-statements.
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