In the earlier years of CRM, a huge deposit, withdrawal or transfer was a possible signal that a customer was preparing to make a larger financial move, prompting a bank to contact that customer for cross selling. And while these "event trigger" transactions don't take place in a vacuum, finding the right marketing pitch for that specific customer has often proven elusive.
By combining event triggers from a wider range of customer activities and transaction histories, a number of institutions are hoping that a better vision of what a customer is hoping to accomplish will emerge, giving banks a greater chance of nabbing customers' extra business. Multi-national institutions such as Barclays, National Australia Bank, Chinatrust Bank, Union Bank of Norway, Bank of America and Taiwan's Fubon Financial Holdings are all deploying software that enables complex, layered event triggers to foster more direct dialogues with customers.
"Rather than just looking for signs like a large deposit, the banks are now looking at things like the aggregated value of a series of deposits," says Kathleen Khirallah, research director in the retail banking practice for TowerGroup.
The software is taking advantage of advancements in analytics and rules-based technology, which is enabling a greater sharing of data and function between business silos. That means a bank can monitor a customer's activity-then quickly respond to his actions with a higher level of sophistication than before.
What's also evolving is the comfort and experience that banks have gained from more than a decade of matching customer transactions to tailored marketing and sales pitches. "There's a lot of creativity out there with how the technology's being used. As the technology is starting to mature, the banks that have been using it for awhile are pushing past the original intent of the software and are being more creative with how the triggers are being deployed," Khirallah says. "It's almost like we're entering a second wave."
Khirallah says a key improvement has been the ability to generate a response to customer events quickly, before an opportunity is missed. "The systems are far more efficient than simply hoping an employee will notice a customer has dropped some sort of hint through his transactions," she says. "The technology takes the onus off of [staff] and brings the ability to find these sales opportunities."
In the case of Barclays, which did not provide an executive for an interview, the institution recently implemented a product that creates highly-targeted and event-triggered, multi-channel marketing campaigns, supported by the Teradata enterprise data warehouse. The warehouse itself is a centralized, continuously updating repository of integrated, detailed transactional and customer information.
The bank's event-triggered marketing is made possible through the creation of business rules, which are then automatically deployed within the data warehouse. This enables the institution to identify major changes in customer behavior that are indicative of new financial interests-and act upon that interest with timely information on how the bank's products and services can help to meet the customer's needs. The software also serves multiple channels, enabling Barclays to expand the marketing product to communicate with customers across all touchpoints, including the Internet, ATMs, telephones, letters, email or face-to-face.
"We want to put any kind of opportunity into a historical context for that customer, and put that information into the broader context of strategy, such as the customer's value or what's going on in the organization," says Sam Gragg, vp of marketing for customer management solutions for Teradata, which is a division of NCR, which is working with Barclays on on its event driven marketing efforts. "It comes down to how do you leverage the history and context of that customer? You can look at a transaction and say it's out of the normal activity for that customer, but it could be a deposit of a performance bonus. So how you treat that lead can become different."
National Australia Bank is using the technology to help filter and track the 2.7 million transactions that are handled by the bank each day. Whenever a customer does a transaction, information that's considered relevant is placed into the bank's "national leads" system, which also connects with predictions and other analytic information.
The bank first deployed the technology about two years ago, and has identified more than three million sales opportunities that have led to about 500,000 customer conversations. The technology has also allowed the bank to dramatically expand its marketing activities. Before the rollout, it was usually conducting about five campaigns at any given time, a number that's expanded to as much as 500 individual campaigns each night.
