Living in a world that is shrinking
every other second can be very challenging.. I am not referring to any
scientific theory.
This is the new world
of social networking where distance between two human is not measured in miles
of km but in number of connections between them. Whenever I in a public
transport I see almost 80% hooked to FACEBOOK, TWITTER, WHATSAPP, BLOGS or some
other social networking site busy commenting, liking, twitting or sharing some
thing. These social networking sites are bringing people across the world
together and shrinking our planet earth. I am certain that this is situation
not just in Singapore but also across every nation and every city in this
world.
With this avalanche of
social networking site swooping down on us, something that we need to ponder
and deliberate is “are we doing enough to mould our credit card industry to
blend into this new world”? Both as a credit card customer and also as a member
of this credit card industry I feel that we are not doing flexing enough
muscles in this area. In this paper I am putting some thoughts around some
areas where we can use these social networking mediums in providing a better
experience and offer new services to credit card customers. There are 3 main areas
in which we need to design our social media ventures –
·
Engage “participate or become involved”
·
Collaborate “work jointly on an activity or
project”
·
Communicate “share or exchange information or
ideas”
Later in the paper we
will see in more details on what can be done in each of these areas. But before
going into some more details, first and foremost principle we need to
understand is that every social media opportunity is not same. What this means
is we cannot have same social media strategy for FACEBOOK as that of TWITTER,
each one of the tool is meant to be use for different purpose. Defining a
common social media strategy is like taking finding a venue for a group which
includes non-vegetarian, vegetarian, teetotaler, drunkard, smoker, non-smoker
all at same time. With this mix it is not possible to keep everyone happy at
the end you will make one of the group low. Being one of the most non-socially
active person in my social network I am not the authority to decide what
strategy will work best for which tool. However one thing is for sure that all
these tools have there own nuances which if not understood can lead to a
failure.
Let us now move on and
start thinking about being social..
SOCIAL OFFERS
There was a time when people did not bother to let others
know about their plans for dinner or family outing and term check-in was mainly
used in terms of boarding of an air flight. But now in this socially connected
world people love to “check in” into restaurants, food courts, movie halls and
what not. And not just that you will see people share photos of what they
ordered for dinner at restaurant they just checked in. Now think if someone
from your credit card bank posts a comment on your wall and recommends a good
dish at restaurant you checked in or recommends a movie at the theater you
checked in. And by the way, you also receive a post informing you that you can
get a 10% discount if you make payment using mybank credit card or send a personal message to the customer
through whatsapp or twit a discount voucher, which can be used at that shop?
Isn’t this exciting? With just one post we have not just made our customer happy but by posting on that FACEBOOK WALL that belongs to our valued customer we have also left graffiti for friends and family members to come and see what we have to offer. To achieve this we probably don’t require someone with credit card knowledge but someone who likes to eat food or watch movies.
Every bank has a
customer service help line for our customers to call for help. And almost all
banks have one toll free number, which can be used when customer is in same
country as bank, and an international number, which can be called for help when
outside the country. This is a service, which was par excellence when we had landline
phones or non-smart mobile phones. In this socially connected world, yes our
customers are on smart phone for most of the time of the day, however they are
no making phone calls. And when you go outside country making an international
call to call for help might itself be a complex process. It is much more
cheaper to get a free wifi connection or a cheap data plan compared to keeping
phone on international roaming or getting a new number in every county you
visit. Also who cares to remember customer service phone number?
Now think, of having a twitter handle, which is easy to remember e.g. @saket_mathur, and can be used by our customers to tweet for help. Consider a scenario where our customer is in a problem and has lost his card and now needs some help to comeback to his country. In this situation how can we expect him to call a help line number and go answer myriad of questions from selecting language preference, entering credit card number, selecting that call is not for fee waiver etc etc. instead of this we have him tweet for help and we immediately enter into conversation and try to figure out how to get him out of problem.
Isn’t this more meaningful service being offered? Remember happy customer will share, retweet, like a good service. To achieve this we probably don’t require someone with credit card knowledge but someone who is in love with twitter.
Gone are the times when people used to meet once in a while and bank
problems were of least interesting topic to discuss. But now in this new world,
every incident irrespective of where and when it occurs is available for
everyone to read and comment. And with so much of time being spent on social
networks people tend to start making preconception about others. Also we need
to remember that more than 50% of our customer are not going to call us to
inform their displeasure and unhappiness but will post it on facebook their
part of the story. I don’t think we do anything about this (unless the post is
picked by some journalist), in this shrinking world ones image can be built or
spoilt by “words of mouth” or “posts of
facebook” or “tweets on twitter”.
Now think if we have someone who looks for negative and positive references to our bank and is able to start a conversation with the customer to understand the problem and help to salvage the situation by resolving the issue. It is important to note that SOCIAL LISTENING does not mean we into a melee with unhappy customer, instead try to understand the problem and resolve it in a mutually acceptable way. Remember when we go social it means we are SOCIAL every thing we do is SOCIAL i.e. seen, liked, retweet by the world. Don’t just look for bad press but also positive feedback, imagine sharing a good feedback about yourbank and immediately receiving a thank you note from the bank. You will feel that someone is listening to you.
Isn’t this more reassuring to our customers. To achieve this we probably don’t require someone with credit card knowledge but someone who is able to understand customer problem and able to resolve problem as a human and not based on documented scripts and rules.
A standard practice that almost
all banks follow before coming up with a new product launch is market research
and probably engaging an external consultancy firm to tell us what our customers wants and how should we
design our product offering to make our
customers happy. In most of the cases a sample will be selected (this sample
based no statistical theory will be indicative of complete customer base). If
this sampling and market research was reason for success and failure of any
product then I don’t think any product will fail at all, however we know many
times every after following all steps we end up with a product which our
customers discard. With this new generation which is stuck to social media, it
is much more easier to reach out to all customers. And the best thing is
majority (much more than sample used for market research) are ready to engage
and collaborate with us.
Now think of a scenario where mybank wants to launch a new affinity credit card, for this if I want to decide charity organizations, which our customers will like to partner with. Instead of spending thousands in market research, we can probably create a blog explaining the product features and ask customers to provide comments and list of charity. This type of partnership between customers and financial organizations is yet to be seen. Very soon we might also be engaging customers to perform USER ACCEPTANCE TESTING for new products, at the end they are the real users. We all like to be asked for feedback and everyone feels proud when feedback is used to improve something.
To
start with this is not about we providing social security support to all customers,
instead it is about how can we use information available in social networking
sites for improving security measures. We like it or not but it is not good
posts, blogs, tweet that are shared, posted, tweeted on social networking sites
but also negative. Every bank spends millions of dollars to ensure there
systems and procedures are leak prove and are capable of identifying any
activity which could result in money in wrong hands. Think about using posts
and tweets made by customer or even friends list to identify customers, which
potentially are or might use our banks servicing in supporting wrong causes.
With ears and eyes on social networking sites we could be able to identify and
avoid many unpleasant events.
What next?... This is not meant
to be a complete list of ways we can ENGAGE, COLLABORATE and COMMUNICATE with
our customers. I am sure many of us will like to consider concerns about our
personal data being used by banks, it is definitely a challenge that needs to
be reflected in carving the social media strategy, but one thing we should
consider is that someone checkin into a restaurant wants everyone to know that
he is going there to eat food and does not want to keep it a secret.
This is just a thought for all of us to see how we can start molding and deliberating in our own circles on using social networking for beneficial for the customers and growth of business. Probably soon we will allow customers to login to bank account using facebook login or will use twitter handle name as customer identification or will have our risk and fraud strategies based on what customers posts or who are in their friends list.
It is just a matter of time and some money to come closure to our customers.
Author – Saket Mathur
(Vice President, Barclays)
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