Optimized customer communications: imagine all the people, as Lennon said, where “..living life in peace”. Sounds wonderful dunnit? How about a meeting room full of product marketers trying to hog customer contacts for their respective campaigns?

Customers out there, won’t we be happy if our banks cut back on those ill targeted, overzealous phone solicitations, stopped mailing the never used credit card cash advance checks, and limited their email, SMS and Internet banking alerts to real (with thresholds defined by myself – ideally!) problems such as suspected fraud or double debit of a monthly bill pay.

If this wasn’t hypothetical but indeed true, I’d welcome communications from the bank. I’d be interested with topical content that are of interest e.g., wealth accumulation. I might actually read all the communications I receive rather than attempting to guess from the packaging which are worthwhile and which go straight into the circular file.

 Unfortunately, despite the known (significant) benefits of contact optimization, only a handful of leading organizations are truly trying. It’s a telltale sign, if your bank doesn’t get customer privacy and preferences right, chances are it won’t get your finances right in the long run. Someone once told me, banks are in fact, as much about technology than they are about governance and risk mitigation. If people don’t respect our time, we protest. If people do not respect our privacy, we most definitely protest. Somehow we’re much more tolerant receiving gibberish from our own banks?

Adoption rates for contact optimization are relatively low because the organizational and technical hurdles are fairly high. Try telling one product manager that the current month’s campaign run will exclude all his/her planned campaigns, and another that his/her lead volume is to be halved!. From a technology perspective, the data fabric must be at a customer level, and a “memory” of all interactions made (and their responses) must be readily available on tap. How else do we plan for a continuum, a horizon, of planned, yet dynamic, contacts?

For this post, I shall describe the organizational challenges we must surmount in such projects.

Trading theory for reality highlights the organizational difficulty in contact optimization. Delivering only significant, timely and relevant communications also means eliminating those that do not make the cut. To meet the expectations listed above, my bank would have to prioritize contacts across functional areas. This means determining which communications are really necessary, identifying those that fall within my expressed interest areas and imposing the organizational discipline to eliminate or drastically reduce anything outside these boundaries. It also means opening the door for turf wars between marketers, branch personnel, product managers, etc. – all of whom have agendas that could be adversely impacted by the restrictions.

Enter the Matrix

While this task is difficult, it is not impossible. Developing a communication matrix is a great first step. This matrix documents the organization’s communication priorities and provides a mechanism for enforcing them. To build the matrix, the range of possible communications is identified and segmented into categories. Common high-level categories include sales offers, service messages, complaint responses, regulatory notifications, retention actions and information request fulfillments. Note that complex contact optimization strategies may include many more granular subcategories as well. Next, the organization must decide how frequently it wants to allow a customer to receive each type of communication relative to all of the others. Allowable time between communications can and should vary based on the type of communication being considered. It may not be desirable to inundate a customer with a sales and service contact in the same week, or to send two sales contacts in a single month. However, a profitable customer that makes a significant withdrawal from savings and cancels multiple direct bill-pay agreements could require an immediate retention call, even if you just talked to the customer the day before. Information request fulfillments, regulatory notifications and complaint responses may receive top priority and may push out the length of time before the next nonessential communication is allowed to happen.

In many instances, the act of developing the matrix itself can help to foster the understanding, cooperation and buy-in necessary to alleviate turf wars. Gathering the right set of key stakeholders (anyone who communicates with the customers) and tallying the current contact levels can clearly highlight overcommunication problems. When you send more than 300 communications per year to your best customers, as one bank unwittingly did, the likelihood that any single message registers is small. Facilitating frank discussion on priorities, such as complaint response over sales offers, and determining time between communications is not always easy but can foster understanding and acceptance.

The matrix can also serve as the springboard for identifying and escalating very real issues. If marketing is measured on the number of customers it reaches out to per month and sales offers are restricted for most of the customer base in January due to the issuance of regulatory tax documents, there is a real conflict between the contact optimization strategy and the marketing performance objectives. Conflicts like these must be resolved in order to effectively implement optimization.

“You, you may say  I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one..”