Are you scared when 
you see teens (or anyone) texting while driving? I just read a recent Marketing Daily article that talks about Allstate’s latest education initiative “X the TXT” that encourages teens to stop texting while driving. Allstate’s campaign leverages the marketing power of Jordin Sparks and the Jonas Brothers. Last year Jordin held her ‘Battlefield’ tour with a 29 city ‘X the TXT’ event/messaging and this year, the Jonas Brothers just began their 12 city "Road Dogs X the TXT" softball tour. I like this campaign for 3 reasons:
1. The Initiative- Allstate takes a leadership position on one of deadliest trends facing teens (and facing all of us who share lanes with them).
2. The Tools- Sure it’s a campaign that benefits Allstate, but it is one with purpose and one that offers parents the tools to facilitate a conversation. It's is a valuable influence on our nation. Rather than unleashing their inner preacher, Allstate has also created a delightful 32 second ‘mayhem’ parody to enlist teens to make good choices. From concerts to YouTube, Allstate is communicating with teens on their turf and in their language (and in a pink car).
3. The Approach- Allstate is using a multi channel approach to modify teen behavior using a variety of relevant media platforms. Allstate understands that it really is a ‘battlefield’ (go Jordin) out there to captivate, enlist, and modify behavior of the mighty teen, and that messaging needs to play ‘softball’ (Go JoBros) NOT ‘hardball.’ According to 85,000 teens who already took the Allstate ‘X the TXT’ pledge… it’s fun, interactive and teens get to hear people like Jordin Sparks tell them directly ‘I’ll be supporting you’. With half of driving teens admitting to being extremely distracted by texting and instant messaging while driving, per an Allstate Foundation study, I’m glad that our nation’s teens are ‘in good hands’.
Posted by Julie Kurd. Julie is a Director on CMB's Financial Services/Insurance and Healthcare Practice who loves ski racing, Tuckerman’s Ravine, sailing and bananagrams. You can follow her @julie1research
Have you seen the MSN Money Hall of Fame and/or the MSN Money Hall of Shame? The fame hall lists the top ten best companies for customer service while the shame hall lists the ten worst. When the list came out I asked my 7 year old to "name companies you think are the best companies in the world." And not surprisingly he was able to guess two (yes, a 7 year old's unaided awareness) of the top ten. These are the companies that we love to love in those easy to please industries...cool, whiz bang products, exceptional advertising, mass distribution, etc.
The trickier part is the Hall of Shame list. And working within the financial services realm, it was disheartening but not shocking to see that 50% of the list is made up of financial services firms.
Here's one mother's take on these halls of fame and shame.... these corridors of our lives, because financial services companies, like mothers of teens, are overrepresented in the hall of shame.
Hall of Fame. I'm personally in my household's hall of fame. My youngest child still holds my hand when we walk. He can't wait to share his day with me and he knows that I am fabulous at everything related to making his life more fun, safer, and happier. If he were rating me from a customer service perspective, I'd get all ‘excellent' and ‘good' marks (and hopefully he would recommend me to a friend.) Companies in the MSN Money Hall of Fame have attributes or value propositions that are similar to my personal capital with my son. He LOVES mommy. We LOVE Apple.
Top Ten Mothers and Leading Customer Services Company Commonality
Our advocates:
Love us and everything we symbolize. Emulate us. Want to affiliate with us.- Want others to know they're connected to us.
- Trust us to make them feel safe and secure.
- Know we empathize with them when they need a little extra listening.
- Know we anticipate their needs and have ‘apps' to help them live better and we always have their best interests at heart.
- Respect us and know they're respected by us.
- Chitter chatter or tweet about our amazingness to others.
- Think up cool ideas and inventions and let us know so we can incorporate them into our dominion.
- Are certain that we've thought about their pain points and have an ability to anticipate their upcoming problems.
- We offer them things (words, products) that ease their condition and infuse their day to day lives with logistical support, relief, and playfulness.
Hall of Shame. Sad to say it, but I am also in my household's hall of shame. My pre-teen has a more mature and admittedly more accurate eye for nuance. If she were rating me from a customer service perspective, her expectations far exceed my abilities. Her frustration is exacerbated by my flub ups and she's very vocal about all the ways I've slighted her. No shortage of parallels here...
Top Ten Mothers and Shameful Customer Services Company Commonality
Our detractors (children, customers):
Expect us (and we expect ourselves) to first thank them for their negative feedback and assure them that we are listening - Feel slighted by every move we make. Everything we mess up, every corrective action we try to take...everything, everything irritates them and is our fault
- Always have to wait way too long, whether they're at the top of the stairs yelling their guts out or on a xx minute phone hold, waiting for service
- Are certain we take them for granted and feel they have little choice but to pout and bear it
- Expect us to do that thing they asked us to do 10 times but we always seem to be working on something else like a dummy
- Expect simple things, all strung together, should be equally easy to accomplish ....as we juggle all the daily transactions in life, we come up short... I am no magician...I can't get milk for cereal from the fridge while I'm straightening my older child's hair in the bathroom, plus snacks for school and...you know.... Just can't be done. We've either failed to ‘staff' appropriately or failed reward self directed behavior and wean them from needing us at certain minutes of the day
- They don't want to switch distribution channels....it's easier for us if they service themselves AND if they do, they get what they want and faster but they want to stand at the top of the stairs and scream ‘where's my shoes' and they want us to give them a location +/- 2 feet...'not those shoes, c'mon'.
- Everything we do is SO ANNOYING
- We stink by definition. We don't understand.
- We really, really stink
Mothers and financial services companies both have a knack for irritating our minions. We fall down because we do not fully understand our customers' needs and goals or offer products and services that are truly customer focused.
We need to put brand promises and customer experience in a model that is actionable and sustainable. We need to prioritize and fix the things that matter most to our constituents, plus maybe engage and transport them (but in a cool car please). We may need to reinvent ourselves and become someone new (like Umpqua Bank) or uber-benefit oriented (like ING Direct), or offer cool looking plastic for their wallets that do something that's rechargeable and reloadable and maybe sings a jaunty tune. It is more work than giving out a quick treat or some points, but in the end the effort is worth it.
While moms and financial services firms may never fully satisfy their harshest critics, we need to listen, fix, and communicate. Listen, fix, communicate...
Posted by Julie Kurd. Julie works on the Financial Services/ Healthcare team and thinks a lot about coffee, market research, Boggle, ski racing, sailing and the world of tomorrow. You can follow her on Twitter @juliekurd
You don't often hear health insurance and innovation in the same sentence but as I sat through many of the great sessions at the 2010 Front End of Innovation Conference here in Boston, I kept thinking to myself... "these hackers could really help the health insurance industry."
Many of the presentations we heard were about the new ‘go to market' reality....it's better, faster and cheaper than ever. But most companies aren't there yet. Think about the last time your company launched a product, service, program or tool... Did that product cost your company 2 and 2 (two years and two million) to launch? Maybe longer? Maybe more dollars?
Below are two examples of people who seem to be doing it right with my take on how that could specifically be applied to the health insurance world.
1) Better, more useful information for consumers. As a working mom, one of my goals is to make sure my children are eating somewhat healthy food. Safeway's Foodflex program is a loyalty program on steroids (if steroids were good for you)...it doesn't just spew out coupons to try to get the cardholder to try a new snack product or brand. Instead, it takes to heart the goals, needs, wants and desires of regular people like me. Safeway drills down to nutritional information of all of the goods a person purchases and actually provides a graph of healthy purchase profile (calcium purchased, sodium purchased etc.). Then it suggests substitutions to help you reduce your family's sodium intake or increase your family's calcium etc. WOW!!! Why can't my local grocer do that?
Musing for the health insurance industry. With obesity becoming the #1 cause of preventable death in the US, hello health insurers...why can't providers tie these Foodflex style programs in with my health insurance plan so I get a rebate if I rack up enough ‘healthy eating' points. Forget about that $150 rebate you are willing to give me if I pay for (but don't actually use) a gym membership and focus on supporting healthy every day choices for the whole family.
2) Faster to market (with hacker apps). Peter Corbett from iStrategy showed us "apps for democracy" or ‘fixmycitydc' (Fix my city of Washington DC) to see how common citizens created apps to fix potholes, broken parking meters and other nuisances. These guys are doing amazing things....a common citizen can take a picture (actually, it's a link not a picture) of a pothole, attach it to a GPS location and send it in to the government. Then, the site is integrated with Washington DC's 311 system and the ‘open job order' to fix the pothole or the parking meter etc. is checked by the system until the job order closes. And when it closes, you get a notification that ‘your' pothole or meter was fixed! How's that for a closed loop process.?
In the past, it seems that broken parking meters took an average 6 days to repair and now...well, it's much faster. A ‘hacker' came up with an app and now the government can track it...check it out... http://bit.ly/apps4all.
Musing for the health insurance industry. Like many of you, I have a high deductible insurance plan. Can a ‘hacker' come up with an app for us so we can easily evaluate a) convenience, b) cost, and c) medical outcomes of particular procedures? From the simple strep throat test (let me evaluate minute clinics in my area vs. a formal appointment) to things such as knee surgery, I should be able to quickly and easily make choices that fundamentally lower my out of pocket healthcare costs of shopping among providers with an equal or better outcome than my default ‘primary' and with the level of convenience I'm seeking.
Heck, I may even decide to become a ‘medical tourist' in the US...if I needed a planned procedure that was more inexpensively executed in someplace like Buffalo, NY and with a better outcome, why wouldn't I go and visit friends, zip over to Niagara Falls, get my whatever fixed and then return home? Isn't all that information available and just like ‘fixmycitydc,' can't someone link it all up to help me make wise choices in managing my health?
With healthcare costing us about 16-17% of GDP in the US and the outcomes no better than in countries such as Germany with ~9% spending of GDP, can't we just completely change the game?
Below you can see what attendees thought other highlights from FEI 2010 were. Enjoy!
Posted by Julie Kurd. Julie is a Director on CMB's Financial Services, Healthcare, and Insurance Practice.
I was recently in San Francisco and decided to check out "mausoleum row," a stretch of the city with elegant and stately bank branches after bank branches after bank branches....a historic financial district street that shouts "I'm here forever."
While staring at this impressive, but seemingly outdated, group of buildings all I could hear was what my daughter might say looking at the same scene, "banks, get over yourself."
Does my household really need to bank at a branch anymore, now that we have an ATM, credit/debit cards and a mobile phone? Maybe we should look for a company without a bank branch within 2 miles of my house, the standard distance most banks have acknowledged as the ‘deal maker/breaker' to earn customers and receive high satisfaction scores. If a bank didn't have a branch within 2 miles of my home or office, maybe it would mean the banks might be spending less money on things that don't matter to me!
And even further, does my household even need cash anymore? Everything from fast food chains to cabbies accept plastic right now. Even the transit line and parking meters are cashless in most major cities. While we have to replenish with a check, even my kids' school lunch payments are automated. Even my kids' spare change is on an individualized, prepaid reloadable card.
Admittedly, I am not an early adopter. So, when I am thinking hard about getting away from traditional banking processes it means I am not alone. Financial institutions need to recognize that the basic needs of customers are rapidly evolving and adjust. In an increasingly paperless world, banks need to put themselves in the shoes of their customers and ask "what do I need from my bank and what can my bank do to help me meet my goals?"
Segmentation Best Practices webinar
April 29th at Noon: Chadwick Martin Bailey's Brant Cruz will present best practices of market segmentation based on his years of experience he has as CMB's segmentation guru working with clients like eBay, Electronic Arts, Plantronics, and Microsoft.
Register here.
Posted by Julie Kurd. Julie is a Director on CMB's Financial Services, Healthcare, and Insurance Practice.
1,700 of us converged in Vegas at IIR's Prepaid Conference in February to talk about this new frontier business, "pre-paid"(think about it as your money (you know, debit) available to you anytime, anywhere).
We used to think of prepaid simply as a prepaid debit card but now the prepaid world is converging with the mobile applications world and a magical thing is happening...in the near future you may not need your wallet anymore, because your phone is holding everything, including your money. Some of the smartest frontiersmen and women from the Fortune 500 spoke, presented, mingled and shared thoughts about the world of tomorrow.
When one thinks of the staggering estimate of 70,000,000 people who are ‘unbanked' or ‘under banked,' that is, living paycheck to paycheck, overdrawing their bank accounts to steep fees (if they still have an account), sometimes using pawn shops, payday loans and other financial instruments that come with steep fees, the prepaid world is asking: Why couldn't life be better for these people? Why couldn't the money just arrive on a card in their wallet on payday? Or better yet, why couldn't the money just zip over to their mobile phone?
And if they're transferring money to loved ones in foreign countries, why couldn't you send it via your phone and get a reply message back when the recipient actually receives the money (and what amount they actually received)? Why couldn't governments save millions of dollars by using pre-paid to reduce administrative burdens of check administration?
Many of the leaders in the prepaid industry attended and spoke at the conference. Some of the highlights:
- Brian Triplett, VISA talked about the broad opportunity to have better public/private relationships and partnerships. He got us all thinking about how we can better partner with government entities in a way to drive better value to the constituent base. He interviewed former President Bill Clinton as well. Together, they explored the central concept of infrastructure and ‘the old way of doing business' being a key constraint as well as how prepaid can transform the administrative burden for the healthcare industry, government payments (unemployment, social security, Medicare, jury duty, employees etc.).
- Alpesh Choksi, AmEx President Prepaid spoke about how he expects prepaid to transform the lives of people all over the world. He says that the economic crisis has helped with articulating financial security, safety and control which is exactly what prepaid provides. People are now connected to their money in new, non-traditional networks. New devices are being born every day and two-way devices such as phones now allow people to service differently... direct to consumer tailored marketing campaigns based on location etc. are really not at all far-fetched or constrained by budgets or tools anymore.
- Laura Kelly, SVP of Global Prepaid and Healthcare for MasterCard talked about prepaid as being ‘smarter, bigger, better.' These are not small splashes...Her "Smarter" stood for the innovation as evidenced by the Easy Link prepaid card in Singapore which is both a transit card AND a shopping card. Her "Bigger" is a walloping large payroll program launched by WalMart that saved 258,000 pounds of paper and gas for associates to drive to the store for their paycheck. Finally, her "Better" stood for better for the consumer. She used the example of social security prepaid cards that are now being used by nearly 900,000 people in this country to provide a more secure way of getting money directly to the people who need it without fear of checks disappearing from mailboxes.
- Farhan Ahmad, GM of Emerging Business at Discover talked about the need to get new innovative products to market in less than 6 months. No small feat for a large company. He and his team are considering mobile payments as an emerging solution that can fundamentally affect the infrastructure for the USA with "better, safer, more convenient access to people's money where/when they need it."
Segmentation Best Practices webinar
April 29th at Noon: Chadwick Martin Bailey's Brant Cruz will present best practices of market segmentation based on his years of experience he has as CMB's segmentation guru working with clients like eBay, Electronic Arts, Plantronics, and Microsoft.
Register here.
Learn more about the Prepaid Expo or watch some of what these leaders are talking about below.
Posted by Julie Kurd. Julie is a Director on CMB's Financial Services, Healthcare, and Insurance Practice.
As everyone knows, on January 12 Haiti was devastated by a 7.0 magnitude earthquake. In the days following the disaster lots of organizations rang bells and helped us all transfer money to the relief effort. One big difference from the past occurred to me as we considered the best way to help... The people making it easy to transfer money weren't financial institutions.
In an email from Apple I was told that I should "Donate on iTunes - it's as easy as buying a song." Verizon told me all I had to do to make a $10 donation to the American Red Cross is to text 90999 with the word "HAITI" and then I'd receive a (free to me) text response to confirm my $10 donation, all of which would go to aid. My donation would appear on my bill.
I went to Amazon to buy a book and it says I can donate with Amazon payments to Haiti. And for eBay of course, I always can transfer money using PayPal account. My cousin, who's an artist, is donating 100% of the proceeds of his artwork on Imagekind.com, a CafePress company.
In many cases, my children are involved in donations to worthy causes. As I was collecting my 10 and 7 year old's physical cash and making my electronic donation, the conversation drifts... How many people may be buried alive? Can people swim to safety? What if their moms and dads are dead? How did Giselle mail her $1.5M donation to Haiti? How can we save so we can help more?
When I was younger, the solution was simple. Get a passbook at the bank and encourage savings, allowing children to spend on the things important to them. But now the real banks assess fees for low balances and those lollipops can be found at the hairdresser, which we visit with more frequency.
My kids affiliate with those relevant, exciting and trustworthy companies that make it easier than ever to donate. As relief organizations circumvent traditional financial institutions and deal directly with consumers, and with the ease of transactions and evolving technology, I can't help but wonder: are iTunes and eBay my new banks?
Segmentation Best Practices webinar
Chadwick Martin Bailey's Brant Cruz will present best practices of market segmentation based on his years of experience he has as CMB's segmentation guru working with clients like eBay, Electronic Arts, Plantronics, and Microsoft.
Register here to watch the full Webinar.
Julie Kurd is a Director on CMB's Financial Services and Insurance Practice.