Each day millions of customers have dialogues with financial service institutions in branches and on the phone. Those conversations are the customer’s primary contact with the organizations. What happens during those few minutes will determine the customer’s view of the company and the success or failure of the relationship. For the customer this is the relationship, yet what actually transpires in that time is largely a mystery.

Despite huge investments in hiring practices, training and CRM platforms what is known about a customer contact is that it took three minutes and six seconds, and a product was or was not sold.  If you could look inside the conversation, map out each component for each customer you could introduce ideas and see which are the most effective then consistently apply wining strategies to each customer situation improving both customer satisfaction and profitability.

For almost decade Novantas has been the pioneer in the application of science to customer interactions. Over dozens of engagements with the world’s largest financial institutions Novantas has developed the tools and techniques to understand and improve the effectiveness of customer interactions. Our approach, coupled with our Mindswift platform, dramatically improves the results. Whether the objective is a new hire, the acquisition of a new customer, deepening an existing relationship, retaining more customers or collecting more dollars we improve the profitability of each interaction.

Mindswift is an ASP (application service provider) solution that guides and measures each component of a dialogue with a customer, allowing the institution to measure and learn from each interaction, locate opportunities for improvement and test different solutions until the optimal outcome is achieved. These best practices can be instituted in existing CRM applications or rolled out using Mindswift on each desktop.

Using Mindswift our clients have turned call centers into profit centers, improved collections effectiveness and retained more profitable customers than ever before.

Adaptive Dialogue Management

Most organizations have invested heavily in training and CRM platforms attempting to get the right people sufficient data to have meaningful conversations with their customers. Call center costs can amount to 20-30% of a financial institutions costs yet what occurs during each interaction is largely unknown. As an example, a typical bank will know that during a customer call the phone representative spoke for 2 minutes and that the service call was a balance inquiry. But what really happened during that call? Did the customer express interest in other products and were they offered? If a product was offered, what was the customer’s objection? Did the representative address the customer’s concern or offer a different product based on the customer’s response? Was it the right product and was it positioned in the based way for that particular customer segment? Where exactly did the sales pitch break down?

Mindswift provides empirical data on each step of the conversation and guides the associate using best practices, making dynamic decisions based on the situation, the type of customer, the skills of the representative and the customer’s responses, recording each outcome at every stage.

You can't manage what you can't measure and Mindswift provides the data to examine customer interactions as never before. In the above example our sales effectiveness was improved by 47% after identifying which components of the dialogue needed improvement and then testing variations for optimal yield at each stage.

Generating Value

The value of Mindswift is driven by the discipline of the process and the power of the toolset. Using empirical data Marketing can measure and control outcomes in phone and branch channels while testing thousands of alternatives in the time it takes most organizations to test two variations.

1. Analytically-based hypothesis development
   Examine past customer research, existing models, customer segmentations and results from prior programs and through structured brainstorming sessions create a set of testable hypothesis
2. Experimental design
   Create a set of well defined test conditions to disaggregate cause-effect relationships for meaningful test cells. Define immediate and downstream metrics and meaningful controls to ensure that the results can be read properly.
3. Clean execution
   Create training, oversight and incentive structures aligned to promote adherence to test objectives and execute the experiments with appropriate tools and oversight to create meaningful results.
4. Analysis and interpretation of results
   Continually examine data to identify improvements and iterate test designs to capitalize on opportunities identified. Analyze data by customer segment for segment specific improvements.

Through this cycle the organization evolves to a more customer-focused team – with a better understanding of what works for a customer, better data on the customer, and tailored offers based on that customer’s unique needs and wants.