Using EDM to give bank customers what they want

In Banks Get Their Bearings Online Evan Schuman covers some of the positive news on how banks are starting to "get it" online.  Although much of the article covers web design and other related topics, a couple of quotes leapt out at me as pointing up the value of an Enterprise Decision Management approach.

"Another key report conclusion is that customers are hungrier for related banking services and that they want to be sold to more than banks had assumed"

One of the key premises of EDM is that customers don't mind being sold to, provided that the selling obeys the rules (privacy, preferences etc) and that it is relevant (targeted, appropriate, cognizant of what has gone before). EDM gives you the tools to assure this kind of targeting (combining business rules and predictive analytics) so that even automated selling can be done in a way customers like and to which they will respond.

Among the verbatim comments bank customers told her team was "This bank knows so much about me that I wish they could tailor their offerings to me," Brown said.

Enough said, I think. Clearly customers want you to take what you know about them, predict what they might be interested in and filter that based on explicit preferences or other rules so as to target them with tailored offerings. Banks using an EDM approach can do this and deliver those tailored offers not just to their website but to their call center, their branch agents and their ATMs. Customers want to feel loved and "known" and well targeted offers can do that while also creating new business opportunities.

The Keynote survey also found a significant continuing decrease in how important people found ATM locations. In 2003, 55 percent said ATM locations were important, a figure that dropped to 52 percent last year and to 47 percent this year.

This was the last item that intrigued me. Several reasons were given but I can't help wondering if the "dumbness" of most ATMs plays a part. If you use the web a lot you might find the clunky and unhelpful ATM interface more and more annoying. If banks could make their ATMs more like a web kiosk, with more of the same personalized selling and assistance, would people like ATMs more? Perhaps the question that should be asked of folks is what they want to see in an ATM network, not just what locations they want.

Banks are using EDM more and more and these statistics show why.