The 2012 Banking Challenge: Paper turn-off test cases – predict the outcome

“We offer electronic bills and statements, but can’t get customers to turn-off paper”

Does that sound like you? Striata is often approached by organizations to assist them with turning off paper rather than just providing an electronic billing or secure document delivery service.

Have you heard these excuses from your output management or eBilling team?

“Customers aren’t signing up anymore” or “Sign-ups are good but customers still want the paper as well”

As many eBilling projects hit a plateau of customer adoption, the cost of turning-off each piece of paper increases and the project team hands the hot potato of paperless adoption to the marketing team to come up with ever more inventive and desperate incentives for customers to suppress paper.

The truth is that if you have 25% adoption for eBilling on your customer portal and you are already battling to sustain this paperless adoption rate, you are never going to reach 80% with your current model.

You need a new approach.

But don’t take our word for it – just follow our blog for the next six months as we run the 2012 Banking Challenge – and enter your prediction of the adoption rate for each model below.

Striata is engaged with 3 banking projects – each with a fundamentally different adoption model.

The results from each project will clearly show the value of each approach.

Bank A Profile:

High street UK bank with customer statements within Internet Banking. They wish to drive up to 1 million existing customers to go paperless by incentivising them to sign up to Internet Banking. This is no easy task as these customers have resisted all efforts and incentives to date. All efforts for this process will be 'opt-in' only (you can’t force someone to register for Internet Banking). Process will include email & SMS marketing, as well as call centre scripting. Once registered for Internet Banking, customers have to opt-in for eStatements and turn off the paper.

Bank B Profile:

High Street UK bank is launching Secure eStatements, with registration required on their webpage or through the call centre. Choosing eStatements will automatically turn off the paper. Customers will be informed of the eStatement option via email.

Bank C Profile:

African bank focused on credit card statements. The bank is implementing eStatements with the accelerated Striata eAdoption strategy. Customers with existing email addresses on file will be sent an eStatement, as well as a paper statement for 3 months – after which the paper statement will be turned off, unless the customer specifically asks to remain on paper. Customers without email addresses will be sent a text message (SMS) asking for their email address and then automatically included in the above process. Bounced emails will automatically be sent an SMS asking for an updated email address. Call centre scripting will be amended to ask for an email address as part of the authentication questions and update as required.

All these organisations are our clients and we would like to wish each of them success in their paper turn-off strategy! However, the respective model that is followed will clearly give them a different chance at success.

What do you think the results will be after 6 months for each of the above banks? Input your predictions below and we’ll publish a table of the closest predictions, once the projects have run their course.

Michael Wright
striata.com

Avoid the marketing void - go Transpromo!

Companies are increasingly offering their customers digital solutions to replace paper communications, as this happens, customers are no longer marketed to effectively and a marketing gap occurs.

So, where a statement was sent with a bill stuffer, an email pulling them to the company's portal is now delivered in text format, with no personalisation, tracking and certainly no relevant marketing.

This is where transpromo marketing should be transported from the off-line world to the online world. Transpromo is about adding marketing to transactional messages, which include invoices, statements and bills. These messages enjoy some of the highest open and response rates because they are expected by customers - a perfect platform to add relevant marketing.

There are many of these types of emails leaving organisations with little to no input from the marketing department, because they’re seen as operational and usually ‘managed by IT’. However, every customer touch point should have a consistent voice and brand, which is usually exclusively managed by the marketing department.

These transactional messages should form part of your customer lifecycle communication programme, designed with the customer in mind and created with the aim of increasing revenue or entrenching your brand further.

There are many examples of transpromo marketing on operational and transactional emails, such as dropped basket campaigns and holiday booking confirmations, where this tactic has been used well and the results are evident by the upturn in sales. When implemented well, this type of marketing can really out-perform other media.

It’s not just about increasing sales though, it’s also about getting the customer to take action and engage in this prime email real estate. Adding easy steps to set up a debit order (when the customer hasn’t done so), when sending out a customer’s bill, as an example, can get the customer to take action. But, if this copy remains as a standard in this email, customers will quickly become oblivious to these messages and stop reading them altogether.

A few tips to consider when implementing a transpromo strategy:

• Identify the 'forgotten' transactional emails that are leaving your organisation without any input from marketing
• Tackle one email at a time – it’s a mammoth task, so rather take time to get each one right
• Profile customers and start including messages that are relevant to the individual customer at the time the email reaches them
• Ensure these messages are relevant and that the messages change at regular intervals (don’t simply leave a direct debit message there indefinitely in the hope that the customer will one day act on it)
• Track everything and make changes to maximise your ROI on these emails

Transpromo marketing provides an ideal opportunity to engage your customers when an electronic relationship has already been established. By fully utilizing existing transactional email you can extend your brand, market your services and present offers to customers regularly and effectively.

This blog was originally published on the DMA UK’s infobox newsletter and site - view it here

Mia Papanicolaou 
striata.com

Adopting self-service strategies is no 'field of dreams'

Wow – Customer Self-Service is a really complex topic! I was doing research on how customers adopt self-service channels and found a study by Limebridge, an Australian provider of customer experience solutions. They asked 143 cross-industry participants “to assess their delivery and support of self service functions for customers”.

In the key findings, I found a great deal to validate what I’ve been hearing from my colleagues as part of my ongoing indoctrination into the world of push vs. pull delivery of digital documents. You can read the full report here (24 pages), or just check out my top takeaways, paraphrased-where-not-quoted for the time-crunched (who’s not?).

The majority of organizations have not:

• “removed the process barriers that make it hard for customers to use self service."
• embraced…every day customer interaction mechanisms to support and enhance self-service
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To succeed, not only in portal adoption, but also to simultaneously enhance customer experience, organizations:

• must make “customer adoption easy by reducing the effort for customers in registering for and adopting self-service mechanisms”
• design self service from the perspective of customer usability
• “turn on…SMS, email and click-to-chat to enable customers to interact in ways that they expect".

Overall, the study focuses on ease and convenience of use as the key drivers for successful self service initiatives. It recommends eliminating adoption “barriers such as passwords and registration” by leveraging inexpensive and ubiquitous SMS and email channels, which are, as many studies have shown, preferred by customers.

I think this explains why “portal projects” often fail to achieve adoption targets: processes are built to deliver required functionality, with an “if we build it, they will come” mentality that delivered great profits for the aptly named 1989 blockbuster, “Field of Dreams”, but has proved a path of great resistance for today’s über-busy customer.

Organizations should meet customers on their own ground (email inbox) and make the portal journey effortless by removing registration and password requirements. This creates a customer experience that is seamlessly woven into the fabric of customer daily habits. Using a multichannel strategy that maps to customer behavior can turbo charge any self service initiative.

Striata has case studies for various industries that show how secure document delivery via email compliments a portal self-service offering. We’re happy to share this knowledge with you.

Keira Holland
striata.com

Ditch your website registration for paperless adoption

If website registration is required, more than 75% of your consumers will not adopt paperless billing.

For the better part of a decade, billers and financial institutions have been trying to get customers to agree to turn off their paper document and fetch it at their self-serve portal or internet banking website.

At the same time, those very same billers have been strongly advocating electronic payment.

Here are some high level statistics as of mid 2012:

• Approximately 65% of all consumer payments in the United States today are electronic.
• Approximately 6% of consumer bills, statements, insurance policies and other documents have been turned off.

It’s hard to believe that electronic payments can be such a spectacular success, yet paper suppression is a complete and dismal failure.

The bottom line: If you require your customers to visit your website, register, choose and remember usernames and passwords; your paper suppression will plateau at well below 25% of your total customer base after 5 years.

What’s the alternative? Eliminate the biggest barrier to paper suppression

Electronic consent is the process by which billers, banks, and other financial services providers go about getting a customer to agree to go paperless by turning off their USPS delivered documents in favor of receiving electronic versions.

The most common approach is asking the consumer to register at your self-serve portal or internet banking website and at some point during this enrollment, present them with the opportunity to turn off their paper document.

The fatal flaw with this approach, and primary reason for overall poor adoption, is this very step!

The customer experience of this ‘fetch’ strategy is a poor replacement for the traditional paper envelope, and diluting paper suppression activity within a self serve registration process results in an even lower adoption percentage.

There is a far more convenient, cost effective and successful way to suppress paper: Electronic consent via email followed by secure document delivery

The steps are quite straightforward:

Step 1: Verify that you have an accurate email address on file. This can be done without requiring any website visit or outbound phone call.

Step 2: Send a highly personalized email that requires just one click to agree to go paperless (you can attach a sample of the documents to this email).

Step 3: Capture the consumers consent choice WITHOUT linking them to your website.

Step 4: Suppress the USPS envelope and begin sending all appropriate documents as secure email attachments.

It’s as simple as that.

Use of your self-serve portal/website is of course of critical importance too. We therefore incorporate an automated portal registration process that does not require any customer action, into the eConsent process. Ask us how!

Gaining partial vs. full electronic consent

In addition to the convenience of one-click consent, we recommend that you use this opportunity to gain consent for paper suppression across ALL your document types. That way, when you get the opportunity to suppress a specific document type, you do not need to go back again and again to gather additional consent. We know it sounds counter intuitive but in reality, your customers couldn’t be bothered to manage complex preferences, even if giving them the choice appears to be the right idea.

In conclusion:

To gain meaningful paper turn off adoption, ditch the registration process!

Garin Toren
striata.com