The Bank Channel

Some of you may not know that I have a dirty secret. Some of you may know that I’ve decided to join, for a short fleeting moment, a group of people that others find … odd, or perhaps obsessed. I’ve decided, for one bleary eyed Sunday morning, to do a triathlon.

I know what you’re thinking. Lycra, sunglasses, cut to the hilt, chugging Gatorade, doing 100km practice runs, swimming across oceans and riding in volcano fields.

Well, you’d be wrong.

I’m doing the smallest triathlon you can do, so small that I actually wonder if I can wade out to the buoys rather than swim (I really hope so), so small that I fear it’s actually the category 8 year old kids do. You’ll see me crossing the line, then collapsing. Like a winner should.

Still, it’s a target.

And in the spirit of ‘training’ I’ve started using the Nike + app and online training tool. There are many more, possibly better training tools out there, but for me, this will do fine. Fancy graphics and a female voiceover motivates enough, as did the fun of buying new trainers for the little GPS thingy.

Using the system made me think about some of the customer experience lessons this little system taught me – I needed the distraction. Here are the 6 things I can come up with.

Its not about Nike or Apple
No doubt its branded NIKE, and incorporates your ipod or iphone, and that’s part of the reason why you buy it (perhaps the whole reason). But once you use it, it could be made by anyone (who can design a good UI that is) because all of a sudden its you who is driving every aspect – settings, content, data. The tool is merely an empty vessel that you fill with your data. It just works, pretty much out of the pack Adding a GPS transponder in your shoe is simple. Downloading and setting up the app is no worse than the better apps out there. And somehow, I was expecting some sort of link or calibration between the GPS unit and the iPhone, but no. You start a workout on the app, get running, and its captured. Whilst this is a fairly simple function compared to getting a new credit card or internet banking app to work, sometimes we need to keep it this simple.

It connects you to people like you
Yep the standard ‘social’ bit goes in here. But this isn’t the normal application of social that we’re used to. Many social ideas and models rely on the number of participants to correlate with the success of the model – Facebook a good example. But with Nike +, you can have 0 friends, 1 friend or 1000. It doesn’t exactly matter, as long as you go running. Motivation and competition are obvious benefits here. And you can find people who run like you do, as fast as you, near you, or even like the same music.

You set the perameters of success
Everyone has a different idea of what success looks like, what their goals are. So setting your objectives is easy (simple goals like number of kms, time running, etc) and of course can change over time, rather than being locked in. This means your program can respond to how lazy or motivated you are, or towards a specific goal (like a sodding triathlon)

It gets better the more you use it…
The more data you contribute, the more the system might learn about you. Understanding your best or worst times, where you run the best, what time of day, what conditions, what music you’re listening to, what music makes you run faster, all these things can help you create a better ‘athlete’ (use that term loosely folks)

And then Nike creates CRM gold!
Of course NIKE is currently harvesting all that data, and no doubt flogging to the record companies, back to Apple, who sell it back to NIKE and via the iTunes store. Something like that anyway. Again, Apple is creating an ecosystem that connects data, handphones, music, nike apparel, and the lifestyle around all of it.

In the end, it creates good, positive customer behavior
Any piece of gadgetry that captures my data, possibly for unscrupulous reasons (“if it’s free, you’re the product not the customer” someone once said), but gets me out running and getting fitter is fine for me. Means to an end and all that.

“He took the iGoogle idea a bit too literally”

Photo – Incase, Flickr

Think about your favorite coffee shop and the reasons you like it – its probably small, local, comfortable and welcoming.

When you’re there, you enjoy not just the product, or the interaction you have with the staff, but perhaps the time to sit and think, reflect, chat. Its an emotional experience because it taps directly into some of the warmer cockles of our hearts, and cosier parts of our subconscious.

It’s your time, how you like it, in a place that might as well be your other living room.

And then Starbucks came along, and you hated them.

You hated them because they tried to template and franchise that whole notion of the cosy coffee corner, only it was the same as every Starbucks. It had cosy chairs, hand drawn menus, pleasant music, and a buzz where people were coming together.

How dare they pretend to be my local coffee shop.

The retail experience, on a very localised and personalised level, is hard to get right. Starbucks has probably done the hardest work at creating a local or community feel, but have created a footprint that perhaps threatens that ‘artfiical intimacy’ a little.

What’s the opposite – a format that is extremely predictable, formulated and templated.

McDonalds & Apple are probably 2 good examples. This works for them, because this is what customers all over the world expect when they open the door. They expect to see the same surfaces, images, products, etc.

This is why the internet will win.

It’s the perfect machine that scales and offer personalisation at the same time, in (virtual) ways that can’t be matched.

A bank can have millions of customers, but everyone could have an individual, powerful and meaningful experience.

How can we get the balance of personalised enough for customers to feel understood and appreciated, but scalable enough for it to be able to grow to large numbers?

What industries prefer personalised over scale? And vice versa? Let me know.

Photo – Incase, Flickr

If you work in the microcosm of a bank, or the slightly larger ecosystem of the financial services industry, you are a unique and special individual.

I don’t mean in the ‘you can do anything if you put your mind to it, son’ kind of way (although you should believe that if you can). I mean that we work and breathe inside a unique cultural and mechanical context.

We know banking, we know financial services, we build products.

We speak the language. And this can sometimes be the problem.

I had an interesting meeting today about small business customers using business internet banking tools, and how one size does not fit all.

A small business person can be the individual who runs the business after hours, by themselves, from say 10pm to midnight. They’re not an accountant, they’re not business qualified. But they know their subject matter, and how to sell to people who want it.

Another small business person could work deep inside a successful family run business, managing accounts, invoices, receivables etc. They’ve been hired because they do have accounting and business skills. They get it.

A single approach to these customers will not work. Their needs are different, their experience and capabilities are different.

Importantly, they speak different languages. To each other and to us.

Language is critical. The way we in banks talk about money is in the context of banking – products and services, jargon etc. A bank rationalizes a customers behavior by putting it in banking terms – ‘attrition’; ‘acquisition’;’ cross-sell’. Often bankers are trying to find ways to make the customer more intertwined, even permanently attached to the organisation, even if its not in the customers best interest (banks call these ‘relationships’)

The way consumers and even many small business owners talk about money is in the context of life – pay for this, buy that, earn this, save that. A customer rationalizes their banking behavior by putting it in life terms – ‘I changed banks because of the service’; ‘I got this great new reward points credit card’; ‘the bank gave me a discount to buy a new car’. Often customers are trying to find ways to simplify their banking setup, at the same diversify their spread across the banks (custoemrs call this ‘keeping the bastards honest’ and ‘not putting eggs in one basket’)

These 2 positions are often at conflict.

People in banks wonder why consumers, commentators, innovators and even other bankers aren’t interested in the future of banking.

They should be analysing the future role of money in our lives instead.