In my days working as a senior manager in financial services, I saw many examples of “II”: iterative initiatives. These were typically well-meaning strategies or tactics aimed at building business through delivering against key metrics such as:
- monetary value (cost reduction or profitability improvement)
- quality (of goods, service or delivery)
- timeliness
- customer satisfaction
I saw these initiatives as iterative simply because frequently they started out focusing on the benefit that they would deliver to the organization, but over time they inevitably moved toward focusing on the benefit that they would deliver to the customer. After all, customer satisfaction / customer advocacy is often the best differentiators and the factor most likely to assure long-term benefit to the organization.
In one case, I saw a strategic initiative change its moniker over time from being "customer focused" (paying attention to customers) to "customer oriented" (aligned or tailored to customers) to "customer driven" (motivated, moved and controlled by the customers) to "customer led" (guided forward by the customers and their needs). Subtle but important differences.
The same can now been seen to happen in an enterprise fraud management context. The traditional focus, on business benefits derived from single-system standardization, was succeeded a while ago by a more component-based approach, leveraging pre-existing investments, and is now being succeeded by customer centricity. EFM advocates recognize that an organization needs to rely on technology, operations and processes that place the customer at the heart of the fraud risk management defenses. Taking a holistic approach to defending against fraud across products, channels and relationships is important, but putting the needs and interests of the customer at the forefront of that defense is now becoming paramount.
Many risk management professionals, when asked to comment at the board level within their organizations, are being asked to cite their customer experience metrics first before they get on to talking about the monetary exposure. This is a fundamental mind shift.
Using the Net Promoter Score to assess whether a customer might recommend your organization or not is rapidly becoming de rigeur. I was originally blogging on this three years ago, and discussed the impact of this on enterprise fraud management last year. Now we are starting the next chapter of enterprise fraud management.
New developments within FICO such as identity resolution, proximity correlation and customer engagement technologies are all examples of how the customer centricity message has already permeated our approach. In coming blogs I will focus more upon a number of these "centricity" elements in more detail. The pace of change is rapid, the customer benefits are palpable - and that has got to be good news for us all.
