Keeping Hold of Your Customers

The Issue

There’s an old saying – “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer”. With recession just around the corner, maybe we should be saying “Keep your existing customers very close to you”!

In times of hardship customers naturally cut back on expenditures and/or, shop around for a cheaper deal but unless you are prepared for and able to drop your prices, what should you do? Simply put, make sure you:

1. Are there to help your existing customers through this crisis, in whatever ways you can
2. Make sure you are providing your customers with the best service you can whilst keeping your own costs down.

Innovative Solutions

Inside every organisation there’s a huge amount of data detailing your every transaction and possibly even your every conversation with your customers. Its in your Systems of Record. But…few if any organisations are using this data to pre-anticipate their customers’ needs.

Traditional banks are notoriously lax in this regard, mostly acting in a reactive manner triggered by a transaction (money deposited) or event (end of the month or account going overdrawn). But with all the data banks hold on customers, why aren’t they warning existing customers, for example, about the likelihood of them going overdrawn and the steps they can take, with the banks help, to prevent this from happening if at all possible? At least one wise bank, First Direct are taking steps to do just that.

The other thing we should all be doing is making it as easy as possible for our customers to get answers to key questions and do business with you, almost on a 24×7 basis. Remember how bad things got during covid when we couldn’t hold of anyone because all of the call centres were closed down and branches etc were closed? With AI driven conversational chat bots you can help virtually all of your customers self-serve, saving them time and you money!

Case Studies

1. Pre-anticipating customer needs – One of our firms have been helping First Direct, already renowned as the best at customer service (and not just in the banking world) become even better but using the data they routinely collect to ‘analyse’ customer transactions and behaviours to determine if they need special help or advice from the bank ahead of a situation. In this way First Direct is becoming far more proactive which always helps retain customers. Indeed, in time, they might even become fully autonomous!
2. Helping customers self-serve – Another one of our firms have a tool that allows companies to build intelligent, AI-driven self-service tools thus allowing their customers to get (mostly) all of their questions answered straight away and even carry out transactions. HSBC USA deployed such a tool for the benefit of their customers and achieved a “double whammy”, substantially reducing the time it took for customer questions to get answered as well as reducing the number of calls to the HSBC call centre. This same Clustre firm have also built a demonstrator tool showing how councils could allow their customers to self-serve and reduce demands on council staff.

If you would like to learn more about how to keep hold of your customers, email innovation@clustre.net .