Art Gillis writes the Bank Systems and Technology Blog. In one of his recent posts, he says that the biggest hindrance to growing any bank is the depersonalization of customers.

It is an open secret that many businesses do next to nothing with all the customer data that they collect. With growing volumes and unprecedented business sizes, how can businesses with large customer bases get close & personal to their customers.

To cite a personal story, I have had a CitiBank Card for the last 3 years, but even to this day, I get calls from CitiBank enquiring if I need a Citi Credit Card. These guys don’t even know that I am their customer.!!

Now, here is a four Step Strategy for Businesses to personalize their Customer Service & Relationships.

Step 1: Know Your Data - What do you have?

I strongly suspect that most businesses do next to nothing with their customer data. I am positive that this would be the inference that many people would draw.

The first action item Must be to find out what is the kind of information that you have. DataWarehouses and Customer Databases will surely have plenty of information that you must be able to put to good use.

IT is possible that your data is not available in one single place, in an easy to use format. Or that there exist multiple sources of related information that cannot be used immediately together. You should look at a Information Integration solution

Step 2: Analyze your Data & Formulate your Intent

The problem with volumes is that you just cannot scan it and decide what you can do with it. Use a good BI system to analyze and understand your customer behavior.The point here is that any good management style must look back, to be able to plan for the future.

The deliverable from the analysis must be a clear statement of Intent. What you want to be able to do.For example, here are some things that might come up.

1. If a Customer uses his card mainly for Online Transactions, then offer to convert credit card payment to a ECS Payment for free by sending an agent.
2. If a Customer buys Petrol for more than a threshold amount, offer a discount on fuel purchases
3. If a high value Customer buys movie tickets regularly using his card, provide free tickets for the next big movie.

Similar rules can be thought of for cross selling initiatives also. Here is a discussion on Improving Cross Selling on Customer Service Calls.

Step 3: Action your Intent - Personalized Business Decisioning

Now that you have found trends from your customer data, and even have some action items, how would you convert these into actionable deliverables.

If you look closely, the output of your analysis are essentially those small, customer specific business decisions that you want to be able to execute for each customer depending on his relationship history with the organization.

All these rules will apply for every customer, and the exact rule to be applied will be determined based on his relationship history.

These kinds of rules can be written and managed using a business rules management system. The action Item here is to personalize your customer interaction & service using rule engine driven automation.

It will be a very bad idea to write these rules as code or keeping them close to the database as stored procedures. You will lose all the visibility, and the capability to change these whenever required.

Here is some more info on how your current business process, your BI efforts and the business rules initiative will fit together.

You can also check out the Business Rules Codex for more information on Business Rules Management Systems.

Step 4: Manage & Improve your Personalization Efforts

Once your new system is in place, it needs to be managed regularly.Your customer specific business rules will change often.

You will design new offers on a regular basis based on new learning from your BI. Current offers will have to be retired at regular intervals. The thing to remember here is that all your offer templates will be written as Business Rules

Now, this will at least involve regular maintenance & updates to your rules. These essentially will be business driven requirements.

To start with, these rules will be written and maintained by the IT team. But over time, you should involve the business, and eventually plan for transferring control of these business rules to your marketing department.

You should test how effective your earlier customer specific rules have been, and modify them for improved effectiveness.

Related Reading

1. Business Rules in CRM Archive
2. Business Rules in Customer Service Archive
3. Business Rules in Call Centers Archive