Financial Services 2010- Knowing the landscape

How will financial services firms look in 2010? What will be the key market drivers and operating challenges? A Deloitte Report provides some interesting perspectives:

Key Market Drivers

• New Asset Class will emerge – Capital markets across the world are seeing a centre of gravity shift towards new types of investments like PE and Hedge Funds. Mass Market offerings like MFs will be forced to rethink their products and services.
• Aging Population – The world’s wealthiest generation is quitting and preparing for an indulgent retirement. Very few financial services firms are prepared for this change. Financial institutions of today are largely designed to serve people who accumulate assets and holding assets for the long term. Retirement assets are supposed to reach $ 25 trillion in 2010.
• Payments: P&L Pain or Pride – Banks earn currently 40% of their total revenue from handling payments. Internet-based services continue to eat into this market, cutting banks out of handling and conversion fees.
• Emerging Markets – Opportunities, no guarantees – Emerging markets provide opportunities for growth but they need to adapt the business model to operate profitably.

Key Operating Challenges

• Offshoring - Financial services will offshore their business processes by integrating offshore and onshore operations to create a global delivery model.
• Internal Control - Building the ability to build and consolidate beyond compliance demands.
• Struggle for growth through enhanced customer relationships – There will more service/process innovations rather than product innovations.

Cross-Selling & Up-selling in a contact centre

When millions of customers contact your contact centre, there is always an opportunity to interact with the customers once their primary request or query is addressed. Very often, this  customer interaction may not be used as a  “point of  leveraging the relationship”. Best-in-class organizations use this opportunity to the best.

According to research estimates:

• Best-in-class companies, share several common characterstics.

1. 62% utilize analytics solutions
2. 57% of the agents are empowered to decide when is the right time to sell
3. 57% have access to sales experts and knowledge for informal training

• Best-in-class companies achieved

1. 86% of the companies achieved a sale of $ greater than $20
2. 84% of the companies have customer retention of 50% or greater
3. 59% have a cost per contact of less than $10

Interestingly, only 40% of the best-in-class companies leverage their cross-selling & up-selling measurements to support their cross-selling & up-selling initiatives!

Taming the data beast

In a world where the quantum of data that’s being captured is increasing leaps and bounds, how do companies make sense of these huge piles of data? It is imperative that data must be converted to simple, easy to interpret visual methods at speed.

In this article, Angela writes:

Moore’s Law has driven quantum leaps in the processing power of software and hardware systems. Organizations have become larger and more complex. Demands for up-to-the-minute access to data have intensified.

he most effective way to tame the data beast is through interactive visualization. Spreadsheets and tabular reports are at their limits. Utilizing visual metaphors allows multiple dimensions of the data to be understood at once. In context, it provides a “narrative” for the data. Interactivity allows the user to engage the data in his or her thinking process, which enables a dynamic dialogue with the data.

By empowering knowledge workers with visual tools and hands-on access to data, they can find patterns, distributions, correlations or anomalies across multiple data types. Users can select data elements, filters, highlighting and display options to change data perspectives – from high-level overviews down to the lowest levels of detail. The visual cues inherent in the software enable a deep exploration and understanding of the data set at hand.

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The Value of the Consumer’s Voice

It’s not often uncommon when clients tell us that customers are increasingly not filling-up application/enrollment and feedback forms completely, data about their customers & their profiles are not updated and also information about their behaviour is increasingly becoming scarce & difficult to get, how do companies handle an market environment like this?

We think organizations have to change way they capture or mine data. They need to look at where else can they ‘dialog’ with these customers – Twitter, Facebook, Google Chat etc.? How often have you seen companies even capture  such” Dialog Points” for a possible “information opportunity”?

There is an interesting point of view on the same on this issue. Take a look:

To stay on top of purchase trends or address dissatisfactions, marketing teams often administer surveys and comb through hundreds of thousands of responses to find needles of profundity in the customer service haystack. In reality, if today’s consumer has a gripe or suggestion, he or she no longer fills out a comment card or a survey. Instead, the customer takes it to the keyboard and posts comments online for the whole world to read. Given the influence of word of mouth (or more appropriately, word of “blog”), your business will feel the direct effects of online reviews – positively or negatively.

According to a 2007 Deloitte & Touche study, more than eight in 10 (82 percent) of consumers said their purchasing decisions have been directly influenced by online reviews.¹ With the advent of the blogosphere and social-media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, there are more opportunities for customers to voice their opinions, and the circle of influence has grown much wider. Monitoring for these comments must be a core part of your business.

Organizations have a unique opportunity to connect with their customers just by letting them know they are being heard. JetBlue Airways created a Twitter account after learning customers were using this platform to voice their frustrations. Now, Twitter has become a key customer service portal where the airline offers discounts and responds to flyers in real time. Using Twitter, JetBlue has turned around its negative public perception, even in a struggling aviation market.

The Web’s reach is boundless and social-media text is quite unstructured making it impossible for a typical search to uncover everything of relevance. So, how can marketers and executives sift through all of the social-media noise – the ruminations, misfindings and the insignificant rants – to find the true opinions and reviews about their brands?

The answer is semantic search and analysis. Semantic search provides early identification of consumer concerns, suggestions, likes and dislikes and purchasing trends. It uncovers this information from the most unstructured corners of the Web. The retrieval of such information is not limited to recognizing key words as typical Web searches do. Instead, it uncovers the meaning the words express in their proper context and accepted meaning no matter the number (singular or plural), gender (masculine or feminine), verb tense (past, present or future) or mode (indicative or imperative).