Mexico City, Thursday April 14, 2011.-“We have bad news. The distance between a financial institution and its customers has significantly grown this past decade. The indicators of trust in financial institutions have been significantly reduced, and logically, events like the latest crisis have not helped to recover it, rather the opposite. But there is also good news. We are immersed in the most significant change of social and communications paradigms in recent decades, a phenomenon that gives a second chance to any corporation in recovering its customer relationships. Companies no longer talk in a single, mass and undifferentiated form to their customers, now customers have the floor, thanks to powerful tools that allow them to converse again with their entities,” stated Francesc Perez, Latinia Business Director, in his presentation at the Cards and Payment Methods Congress held recently in Mexico City.
“Let’s get things clear; if there is a 2.0 technology, considering the concept not just in a strictly technological but also a social sense, as an attitude which facilitates striking up a conversation, that technology is text messaging. There will be more innovative and sexier technologies, but, in terms of its current scope and scale, breaking the ice with the customer means understanding and addressing the context – both in time and space – in which the customer interacted with their financial institution, being relevant and sensitive to all of their circumstances, not just their financial situation. Each message sent to that user is a world, an opportunity in itself,” Perez continued.
“Given the emergence of this 2.0 world I believe entities are forgetting the main and most important channel of conversation. A relevant text message to the customer today creates the beginning of a new transaction, the beginning of a conversation between the customer and the institution. The two-way road is not exclusively technological; your bank notification generates customer interest; if the entity successfully develops its content and makes it relevant, if it is capable of customizing it… why would we miss such a compelling opportunity?” argued the company’s main regional director.
“Text notifications, when sensitive not only to the financial situation of each customer, but also applying a contextual filter to determine the origin of the expenses, the amount spent, the place of purchase, the time, etc. all these parameters create a unique opportunity to think of this particular customer, since each element determines utterly particular contexts for the same customer,” explained the Catalan software company’s Head of Business.
“In this sense, our value proposal accelerates and enriches the customer’s entire life cycle within the institution, helping the bank to contact and move customers along the different products and services it aims to offer, by creating new highly customizable points of contact. The capacity to adapt a unique message to the personality of every customer appears as the holy grail of a financial institution which aims to overcome the barriers of an inefficient, outdated communications model,” concluded Perez in front of an expectant audience.
