Customer Engagement 2.0

A usual start of the day: Cycle in the pouring rain to work, your computer doesn’t start and the office is out of coffee…. Too stressed to start working right away, so let’s steal a couple of minutes from the boss to check out some personal stuff online. But these minutes easily become 10, 20 minutes, because first you want to see the news, your personal email, watch a YouTube movie to make you feel good and oh, don’t forget to check out the weather, the sun might show up today!

The initial minutes become half an hour, because you have to go to each site separately, load it, sign in, skip the advertorials and commercial messages and do this 4 different times, for all your favorite sites.

Wouldn’t it be great (for your boss as well), if you could have all your most relevant sites combined in one site? No surfing, browsing, URL-typing needed, just one site that brings it all?

A lot of sites do offer some kind of automated personalization, based on predefined criteria like geographical area (IP recognition), the page you came from or click behavior. But till recently, all these sites were about customization of the site by the website-owner (they predefine the criteria), but only since recently you see sites where consumers themselves are in the drivers seat to create their own personalized websites, based on their criteria. This type of rich internet applications are called ‘Rich Portals”.

This is a big mind shift for a lot of companies. This is really about what the customer wants, and not what the company is offering. This trend is also taking place on the web and in my opinion this is definitely part of the Web2.0 trend: the consumer is in charge! Let’s look at a couple of examples.

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When at the Forrester Financial Marketing event in New York, I had the pleasure to meet with Alyson Clarke, a principal Analyst at Forrester.  We sat together to discuss and share some ideas about Online Advice Tools. We talked about collaborative tools, simple tools like financial calculators, product selectors, and advice tools. She brought her analyst perspective and I shared my perspective as a technology vendor building richer interface solutions to many of the financial institutions.

Alyson’s take is that people are desperate for financial advice and that their needs are not met today. “Firms should focus on delivering a better customer experience starting by giving clients access to financial advice”, she told me. “The need for advice is amplified by new and complex taxes, pension reforms, turbulent markets, and complicated financial products. Most people can’t afford expert advice so most of them are shifting to the Internet in search for advice.” But advice delivery has not caught up.  Sure you can view your accounts, access general information, apply for a credit card or for a mortgage, and do some transactions, but where is the advice - the personal touch that people need – the collaboration?

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Steve Furman found out that an elaborate multi-channel campaign does not necessarily work. Mellon Investment asked him to confirm his tax payer identification number (TIN), by either phone or internet. However, he eventually had to print a PDF document, fill it out by hand, and use USPS to get it back to Mellon.

What went wrong?

On the Internet, the regular login worked, but he was locked out of his account when he was asked to repeat the credentials when confirming his TIN.

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