Financial Firms Leveraging National Small Business Week to Reconnect with Small Firms

May 25, 2012

A number of financial institutions are celebrating National Small Business Week (which is running between May 21 and May 25) to target the small business market. To connect with this audience, these firms are using an array of approaches, including making limited-time offers, publishing small business-related surveys, as well as providing support tools.

Special offers:

Wells Fargo has extended National Small Business Week into its own Small Business Appreciation Month, and is promoting a series of Appreciation Offers to small businesses, with total savings of up to $400.
Like Wells Fargo, BBVA Compass has designated May as Small Business Appreciation Month and is both promoting special offers on a range of products and services, as well as providing free business and economic monthly reports.
RBS Citizens is promoting bonuses of up to $450 to small businesses who sign up for a range of services.

Small business surveys: a number of banks are aiming to generate publicity and position themselves as a voice for small business by publishing surveys that focus on small business optimism, perceptions and challenges.

Bank of America recently published its inaugural Small Business Owner Report, which covers small business owner concerns, aspirations and perspectives
TD Bank published the finding of a survey of small business owners in its primary Northeast footprint. One of the key findings of the survey was that 74% of small businesses expect to meet or exceed revenue projections this spring.
Capital One released its 1Q12 Small Business Barometer, which found that 39% of small businesses reported improving economic condition, compared to 28% in 4Q11.

Small business support tools: Banks are providing an array of information, advice and networking tools to small businesses, designed to position banks as trusted small business advisors and partners. These support tools tend to be provided through dedicated online sites or in physical locations (such as in-branch webinars).

Citibank recently launched the Connect Professional Women’s Network on LinkedIn, which both provides content and offers a discussion forum.

With the economy slowly recovering, and with small business charge-offs (which had accelerated during the financial crisis) now seen as returned to more normalized levels, more banks will be seeking to rebuild small business franchises. So we should expect to see more small business offers, messaging and support tools in the coming months.

Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium: Maximizing opportunities with customers who switch banks

April 6, 2012

At this year’s Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium, J. Michael Beird of J.D. Power and Associates and Becky DeGeorge of U.S. Bank illuminated some important trends around customers who switch their primary bank. The number of customers doing this has increased for the second year in a row – in spite of the fairly high level of effort required to switch to a new primary bank.

How can banks take advantage of this trend?

An obvious response might be to ramp up prospecting efforts – but the speakers pointed out that the reason a customer selects a bank is highly relevant to their long-term profitability. J.D. Power and Associates has found that customers who choose a bank because of the bank’s community involvement are the most loyal and tend to give that bank greatest share of wallet; customers who switch to a bank based on a promotion are, unsurprisingly, at the opposite end of spectrum.

Banks looking to reap the benefits of the current turbulent landscape through prospecting must understand who they are targeting as their leads, as it should drastically change their acquisition strategy.

What’s even more important than acquiring new customers is maximizing their relationship with your bank once they’ve come in the door. How can you avoid repeating the mistakes of the competitors that drove these customers to switch banks in the first place?

The speakers outlined the necessary first steps for onboarding customers: satisfaction of a new bank customer is optimized if they receive a thorough needs assessment and a follow-up phone call within 2 days. This initial interaction has direct impacts on loyalty and share of wallet.

A complete needs assessment gets at what led the customer to switch as well as how they operate on a daily basis:

What were they looking for in their last banking relationship that they weren’t getting?
What don’t they like about their last bank?
What other accounts (aside from the one they originally came for) do they need or use?
How many checks do they write a month?

Such an assessment provides the customer with a positive first impression of the bank, and reassures the customer that they have made a correct decision in switching from a bank where they’ve had bad experiences.

From there, having the person who opened the first account with a new customer call within 2 days to say thank you enhances that customer’s first experience with your bank. It’s a simple step that, according to J.D. Power and Associates, does make a measurable difference in customer satisfaction.

To build on the speakers’ insights, banks targeting customers who switch institutions need to extend and support the customer experience throughout the life of the relationship. How can you use the insights gained from the needs assessment? Are there other simple actions, like that first phone call, that build loyalty in your customers?

SuperBanker: The making of a gamified conference experience

March 27, 2012

Compared with traditional training and marketing strategies, gamification – the application of social gaming theories and techniques in commercial contexts – can dramatically increase audience involvement and the degree to which communications actually change audience behavior. Firms across all industries are becoming increasingly aware of the power of gamification for business objectives, such as motivating and training a sales force or connecting with customers.

This week, EMI launched SuperBanker, an online mobile game, at SourceMedia’s 17^th Annual Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium. SuperBanker demonstrates the use of gamification for business purposes, and was designed to enhance attendees’ conference experience. Players could create their own superhero alter ego, and earned points for answering questions about the session presentations, networking with other players, or visiting the exhibitors at the conference.

Almost 200 top-level banking executives and service providers played the game, which culminated in an exciting fight for first place in the final hours of play. It wasn’t easy to make SuperBanker the success that it was – a delicate and detailed strategy lies behind the colorful graphics of the game. Here’s a peek behind the curtain:

Fitting the imagery and tone to the audience – can a game be too fun? The theme for the game had to balance fun with seriousness, because conference-goers would be in a professional mindset while playing the game. Rather than the traditional superhero tights, the game avatars were dressed in business suits; rather than playing through an animated world of villains and crises, players answered conference-related trivia challenges.
Walking the thin tightrope between engaging and too involved: A game that is too demanding will discourage participation; too easy, and it won’t be fun to play. In a conference setting, there is an additional layer to setting the difficulty of a game: the goal of the game is not to engross players, but instead, to allow them to engage with the game and the conference itself simultaneously. SuperBanker play was designed to be accomplished in between conference activities; what’s more, it rewarded active participation in the conference with game points.
Bringing the game into the physical world: Because a conference audience is physically located in the same place, it was important to bring the game into the physical setting in which the players were interacting via stickers, life-sized cutouts, and other things, in order to connect the game experience with the conference itself and generate continued participation. Perhaps the most important example was a large leaderboard screen that displayed the top ten players’ scores – even though players could instantly access the leaderboard from their own devices, many walked back over to the screen to see it displayed there.
Creating a sense of progress and the attainability of winning: At the conference, one player pulled ahead early and maintained a solid lead throughout. This could have discouraged others from signing up or continuing to play, but SuperBanker was designed to create a sense of accomplishment for everyone playing the game. Players could win smaller prizes throughout the conference; every member of the team with the best average score was awarded a prize; and for the highly engaged group, there were also prizes for second and third up for grabs. And indeed, attendees played the game to the bitter end – resulting in a last minute upset!