Regular reader and colleague Nick W. sent me some interesting thoughts and reactions to an e-mail he gets from his credit card company. It show how difficult it is to get the right nuance when you are communicating to a large group of individuals, but why it is really worth the effort. [The headings are mine]
The credit card company reminder e-mail
"The other day my wife’s credit card company notified her that “Your **** card payment is due”. Nice touch. Attention-getting. They send this out about a week before the payment is in fact due. They ALWAYS send a second reminder with the exact same wording on the due date (which of course, means payment WILL be late) regardless of whether the bill was paid or not. Then about a week or two after we make payment we get a “Thanks for paying your bill on time” email. Then a couple days later we get the note on the next month’s bill…
How the customer feels
Nick deconstructs the history of his reaction to this e-mail:
"Is the feeling when I see one of these emails one of fear – 'omg I missed a payment' or a 'thankful for the reminder – so that I don’t miss a payment'.
"Initially we started in the “fear” category (wife to husband… did you forget something recently?) but is now sometimes in the “thankful” category. ..."
But...
"I really do wish they would get the stream of emails straight, so I don’t get that fear reaction that the ebanking failed us! Which is exactly what happens when we get the second email. Since we get the second notice regardless of whether we paid or not.
"Of course somewhere along the way there is the “stop begging for my money” feeling, too."
Is this a gentle nudge to e-banking?
"Now that we are used to the notices, it seems to me that this “reminder” notice does help us and does gently stimulate us to move us out of check writing mode and more into electronic banking (which we are resisting because of experiences with ID theft). The benefits for the bank must be enormous… they are slowly winning us over by the nudges… and it does probably improve their profitability too (since we probably pay a little earlier than the last day)."
I think Nick's analysis is right on. The bank probably is trying to nudge people to e-banking, but they are doing it in a positive way that actually helps the customer manage their money.
Nick tells me that only one of the 4 banks they are dealing with is doing this nudging in a positive way, despite the clumsiness of the second reminder. The rest are "screaming at us about going paperless", instead of "teaching us how to benefit from e-banking".
"Clumsy" is better than "screaming"
Nick wrapped his story with the conclusion that "'clumsy' is somewhat less irritating and maybe more effective than 'screaming'."
I really like the idea of these e-mails, since I presume it is easy to opt out if you find them more irritating than useful. The second reminder e-mail would clearly be more helpful if it only went to those customers who had not initiated a payment. Let's assume this is not currently possible on the bank's systems, for whatever reason.
They could still likely change the wording of the second e-mail to be more effective. Along the lines of, "if you have already paid your bill, please ignore this notice", and a tip as to how to check or confirm the payment online.
Value added alerts
There are a lot of sophisticated alert systems out there being used in banking and telco applications. But this story illustrates for me that you probably don't need a whiz-bang alert technology to get started -- an e-mailer application might do just fine.
And the effort to engage with the customer in a customer-focused way is clearly differentiating this one bank from the other "screamers"
It's shocking to think that some of your customers may think you are shouting at them, isn't it? I doubt that is an isolated sentiment.
