What Leading Banks Are Learning about Big Databases and Marketing

Many banks believe they can improve profits through information-based continuous relationship marketing (CRM).(*) A better understanding of customer needs can help them acquire new customers, sell more products to those customers, and prevent other customers from taking their business elsewhere. In two years, one large North American bank trebled the number of products it sold per client household by using needs-based profiling; another pursuing the same approach saw a 60 percent increase. Yet others have acquired new customers for loan and investment products who hold transaction accounts elsewhere. And, intelligently used, database marketing has reduced mailing sizes for direct mail campaigns by as much as two-thirds. But this type of marketing approach has to be developed carefully. Many of the fast-growing and profitable US financial companies (such as Capital One) that have stolen business from traditional multiproduct banks are expert at it. To build the same skills, many banks are spending tens of millions of dollars on databases and marketing techniques - with no guarantee of success. The fact is that CRM cannot simply be grafted onto the multiproduct, multichannel organization of most banks. The huge amount of information available to these banks, coupled with the wide array of products and services they sell, can make implementing CRM a complicated and time-consuming task entailing broad institutional change. The marketing formula, related business processes, and supporting technology may all have to be redesigned. In particular, customer acquisition and management processes will have to be adapted and channels coordinated. As Nigel Morris, chief operating officer at Capital One, put it, People talk about Capital One and how it's all in the databases. It's not. It's in the process and the technology.(**) Aware of this challenge, many bankers embark on high-stakes reform. They invest heavily in large databases to market all or many of their products to all their customers; in state-of-the-art statistical models to analyze new data and products; and in organizational structures designed around customers rather than products. But they risk biting off more than they can chew. Although the goals are laudable, those who try to achieve too much, too fast, are likely to find the payoff elusive at best. In our experience, banks that have taken a more modest, gradual approach - building competitive advantage in certain geographic regions or product segment by product segment, and learning by trial and error - have made considerable gains. Those tempted to go for the big bang should reexamine the rationale behind their strategy. They are likely to uncover five myths: Myth 1: Excellent CRM capabilities constitute a successful strategy Many banks are tempted to spend time and effort building CRM capabilities in the belief that these alone will deliver success. But without a clear, compelling value proposition, the power of marketing is limited. What, for example, is the point of building a marketing database or developing attractive promotional and enrollment materials if the product is a high-load, unbranded mutual fund that no one wants? Instead, banks must develop value propositions that give them an edge over product-focused rivals. They can then use CRM tools to extract maximum value from their competitive advantage. An emphasis on relationships can indeed become part of their strategy, but first they must make sure that enough customers value the proposition sufficiently to make it profitable, and that they can deliver on that promise. Once a powerful set of value propositions has been defined, a CRM approach can be used to identify which offers are likely to be most attractive to which people. Using databases to test and refine offers can be an element of a strategy, but it is not a strategy in itself. Myth 2: To capture value from CRM, a bank must organize around customer segments rather than products CRM's focus on the lifetime value of a customer and the ability to segment actual and prospective customers by needs, behavior, propensity to buy, and other characteristics lead, not unreasonably, to the assumption that a bank should be organized around customer segments. …