Bank to save $3.60 per customer by improving client communications
For this bank that works out at around a half million dollars a year in savings, and that is just the start. The interesting thing is that the new statements that will be delivered to the customers are more colourful, personal, easily understood and contain more financial information yet contain more marketing & branding messaging than the previous statements.
Most people think that improving equates to cost – but in reality moving to more intelligent client communications delivers costs savings in paper, power, carbon footprint (to count against your sustainable and green ambitions) but also in time by sweeping away the detritus that has built up over the years in processes and how teams & departments interact.
Whilst saving money is nice – generating profit is far more exciting. The costs savings we identified for our client resulted in them moving to a more finely grained marketing programme with an ability to react to the marketplace in hours and days rather than weeks and months. Their messaging is now targeted to individuals and thanks to their incredible IT team and a little help in creative solution design from ourselves – the people in business and marketing can take control of all this power with minimal technical involvement.
Over the next 18 months they will move the 90% of their client base to e-statements and then introduce charging for paper statements. The envelopes will be marked with the carbon cost including all production and delivery footprints. The individual savings for this organisation will be small – but the increased flexibility means they can introduce new products to specific individuals at launch and generate repeat exposure to the offerings across all of the communication channels providing a coherent message to each individual client.
I will share more about this client and their experiences as they launch and move through the initial phases of their project – we hope to share some of the designs they will be using on their statements with you after their main launch early next year.
Pay tax or give staff new skills?
This is something that keeps falling off our mental check list so we thought to mention it on our blog.
If your company pays tax then you can offset 100% off the cost of any training focused on developing your business against your taxable profits. Isn’t that a nice thought!
This popped up as we were working out a large staff development programme to run over the next few months with a new client. It is costing our client around £19,000 – which after the various tax calculations will cancel out half of her tax bill for her business.
The result – she gets staff who are motivated, skilled and focused on improving her business and she pays half the tax this year!
The only loser in this is the tax man (more…)