Can’t touch this

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes… but you know what, dear industry? So do you.

Touchpoints with customers are not a good thing. Stop counting them. Stop wanting them.

I have been around these halls of ours for two decades now and sometimes I forget to be surprised at how little some of the language we use has shifted.

But recently, I found myself in the midst of an actually intelligent conversation about customer touchpoints.

Now, the thing to know about customer touchpoints is that banks want them. And endeavour to have them. And count them like they are a good thing.

As a customer, I beg to differ, but no matter how many times I have told banks that in my capacity as a customer, advisor, vendor, employee and decision maker… no dice… the obsession with ‘owning the customer’ and touching them at every available opportunity doesn’t go away.

So the intelligent conversation went as follows: in an era of hyper-personalisation, we (the providers of financial services – it doesn’t matter if you are a huge FI or sprightly challenger) believe we need to provide relevant, personalised, in-the-moment and insightful product interventions to our customers.

We further believe that because we have so much data, we should be able to do that.

And although we realise that, when we get those moments wrong and overreach (for example, by trying to sell a loan to a customer who just called to complain about their credit card, or by offering a fabulous FX product to someone who hasn’t left their postcode in four years), the impact of loss of trust and overall annoyance is huge… we also seem to universally believe that the major hurdle to achieving a 360-degree view of the client rests with our own organisation’s ability to organise and parse the data it has.

Like, if we get past GDPR constraints and our own static data lake issues, we would have a full view of the customer…

What does that look like?

My partner and I have our home insurance with the insurance arm of a major supermarket brand, and we have consented to the data sharing request that allows our insurance to earn us reward points because, why not? We also happen to shop through that particular supermarket’s digital channels regularly enough for them to deduce it is our default shopping choice and our main one. I am not proud of that, but convenience trumps looking for independent alternatives in central London most weeks.

Because we have done our weekly shop on their app, week after week, for YEARS… they also know that we have never, ever bought pet food. Or pet care products. Or a single poo bag or cat treat.

And yet they keep offering us pet insurance.

With an insistence that makes me wonder whether they know something I don’t.

So. A proper 360-degree view of the customer looks like the opposite of that.

And this is where the conversation became truly thoughtful.

Because the problem that FIs have, though, is not just how to get the data they hold for you to tell you the full story. The problem we have, the problem you have, is you don’t have the full story and never will.

The era of single-banked individuals is long gone.

How many bank accounts do you have?

I appreciate that our community is not a representative sample, but actually being multi-banked is normal these days. As is the habit of having your credit card, pension, mortgage, insurance, savings (if you have them), loans (if you have them), payments apps and investment solutions (if you have them) with separate providers. None of whom have a full view of your finances and, unless you choose to leverage open banking to let them see everything, they never will.

Because they won’t share with each other anyway. So there.

So.

If we can agree that FI organisations aren’t great at working out what the data they have tells them… and even if they are supremely good at that, the data they have never tells a full story… then isn’t it time we parked the fantasy of a 360-degree view of the client (because it isn’t ours to have) and hyper-personalised, in-the-moment service?

Let’s instead work out what good pricing looks like… what fair products look like… for the needs of the customers as we understand them. Because we actually have good data on that. And we can definitely get better at understanding what the data we have tells us about that.

Then… hear me out here…

Then we can partner with people who have the rest of the view of the client and embed (yes, yes, I know, client touchpoints being lost, boohoo) the service where the need is. And leave the touching to others who may be more welcome to it.

Or leave the touching and owning of the client to the past where it belongs.

Nobody owns a client.

Nobody knows a client fully.

Serve their needs by making it easy for them to find you when they need you. And that doesn’t look like bombarding them with mortgage deals the day they paid off their mortgage… with you. Or offering them a credit card very similar to the three they already have… which you should know about because they all get paid through… you.

It’s not a data problem.

I mean, it is a data problem: you are terrible at this.

But even when you get good at this (and I have absolute faith that you will continue getting better), you will still not fix the thing you are hoping to fix.

Touchpoints with the client are not a good thing. Stop counting them. Stop wanting them. The client doesn’t want them. With every touchpoint, you go ‘hurrah’ and they die a little. It was literally not as good for them as it was for you. Ever.

I have been talking about this for decades, by the way. Hence the broken record accusations being largely true.

You can’t do that: that’s the refrain I have had from everyone when I suggest this.

Even the custody banks don’t like being invisible, and they are invisible by design.

Everyone wants a shop front. Everyone wants their clients to know them and consider them important. Everyone forgets that speaking to a provider a lot is the opposite of good service most of the time.

Everyone wants more of what they have been told is a good thing.

But what if it isn’t?

What if it is neither a good thing, nor is it a useful thing and, by becoming invisible and not touching the client, you end up offering better service and making more money?

What if, hear me out here… we have been measuring the wrong thing all this time and that’s why it’s not working?

Because it is not where we solve this.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.

She is a recovering banker, lapsed academic and long-term resident of the banking ecosystem. 

Leda is also a published author – her first book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, is available to order here.

All opinions are her own. You can’t have them – but you are welcome to debate and comment!

Follow Leda on X @LedaGlyptis and LinkedIn.