Financial Services Focuses on Customer Experience
The Financial Services Panel featured influential decision makers from VISA, CountryWide Home Loans, Manulife Financial, and Ameritrade. As billed in the AD:TECH program, this industry is one of those most impacted by the advent of the Internet. These organizations manage billions of dollars, and are highly reliant on a trusting relationship with their customers. And, their marketing behavior reflects the importance they place on this relationship.
Manulife is a relatively unknown brand, but since their merger with John Hancock they are a global financial services company operating in 19 countries. For them, growth within their current customer base is a high priority. Ralph Vizi, VP of Strategy and Research at Manulife Financial described how the company recently spent $20 Million on complete revision of the online and offline experience.
One result of this exercise was a new tool to help customers set a financial retirement goal in less than five minutes. They found that customers that participated in the program did see a net increase in assets, and a 20-33% increase in website usage.
The point of all this, is that Manulife is trying to understand their customers existing life goals, and then create solutions to help them accomplish those goals. This was a theme repeated by Kelly Passey, Director of Incentive Marketing at VISA.
According to Passey, VISA, as a B2B provider of card solutions to over 14,000 banking partners, has focused on providing tools to member banks. These tools allow the banks to customize their VISA service offerings to their clients. Passey's presentation focused on a tool developed with SBI/Razorfish to allow member banks to create custom incentive programs through a web based interface. Banks can pick and choose benefit programs for a number of vendors, all pre-negotiated by VISA.
The second half of the presentation focused on customer acquisition. And here, the institutions were following a well-beaten path. Rich media, has been found to be particularly effective. Rhonda Winchell, Director of Advertising for Ameritrade detailed their use of full page peel-backs on Yahoo Finance as part of a Last Market Hour program. During this promotion they would run media between only 3-4pm for a full week with the tagline "What can you accomplish in an hour?"
Rich Grobel, Vice President of Countrywide Home Loans described his steps towards a fully integrated online and offline marketing program. Their customer model defines "Delegators", "Validators" and "Self Directed" individuals as moving progressively more towards an online or phone-only loan transaction.
These groups seem to approach online marketing as you might expect them to with so much trust on the line…conservatively. As Kelly Passey said "We're bankers, we understand risk, and we don't like it."
