Rio de Janeiro, Wednesday 25th May 2011.- This was the unequivocal message of Francesc Perez, the software vendor’s Business Manager, during the talk he gave today on the use of SMS Banking at the Movilforum Latin-American Conference 2011 which is currently being held in Rio de Janeiro. The event, of which this is the tenth edition in Spain, emerged as a Telefónica initiative aimed at promoting collaboration between the operator and the Latin-American business community to develop services and applications based on mobile telephony. Latinia is attending as an exhibitor and guest speaker for the second time.
“During the last 30 years the distance between the customer and their financial institution has increased greatly, both because of the former’s lack of interest, due to discussions on finances holding little appeal, and because of the commoditization of a highly undifferentiated offer by the latter, causing customers to be increasingly indifferent to the habitual, and in some cases historical, relationships they have with their banks”, Perez began.
“Customers are increasingly sophisticated, active and well-trained with regard to their finances; they demand multichannel contact and full availability, because their time is more valuable than ours, and more complex and customized services”, continued the Business Manager of the Catalonian software company. “Customization and relevance are precisely the two key words for understanding the new approach and recovering a dialogue now lost”.
“Every notification, every alert, can be the start of a new conversation. Providing SMS Banking services is no longer a differentiating factor of the multichannel services a financial institution offers if you don´t think of it in business and cross-selling terms and not simply as an isolated notification of a card purchase. We must proceed with that first line of thought, something which arouses the interest of our customers… Can we inform them of something else which is of interest to them? Perhaps according to whom they are? Or according to the transaction-type? Or the amount involved in that transaction? Perhaps depending on where they are? This means thinking of the customer, moving on from market segmentation to a marketing of contexts”, Perez emphatically stated.
“If an SMS message is unequivocal, in other words, it’s me the one that has spent $121 in the Augusto Coupey’s Wall-Mart at 15.32 a.m., and nobody else, certainly not 15,000 people, CRM model, why do we not treat it as such?”, Perez challenged the audience.
“The ability to adapt a message to the needs of each customer has become a real holy grail for financial institutions in order to overcome the barriers of a communication model which is completely obsolete and inefficient, and in order to accelerate and provide elements which increase the life cycle of a customer within the institution, allowing the bank to grow though the different products and services which it plans to offer the customer by creating new highly customizable contact points”, Perez concluded.
