Cross-selling or stalking?

Background: This major NZ bank had recently cancelled a cross-sell project after three years and significant cost. The project had gone through requirements, RFP, vendor selection and standing up the new system, but when it came to integrating with all of their existing systems, the timeframe and cost projections for the delivery blew out so much that they simply had to cancel the project.

Approach: The Exec GM of Corporate Strategy had been working with the product team to develop a customer-led approach, and I coached the team around moving to an iterative approach around the insights they were gaining. He had challenged them to find 10 cross-sell triggers that delivered better results than the current direct marketing initiatives.

For the first trigger, the team chose to focus on people who had changed a savings account name to 'wedding'. Together, we designed an experiment that enabled them to get an offer in front of those customers as soon as possible to see if they would actually buy. They were able to pull together an existing tweaked offer, get a few days from a member of the outbound telesales team, write a script, extract the customer data, and get ready to start selling.

But the project had also been carrying a major risk. The Steering Committee had expressed concerns a number of times that people might feel 'stalked' if the bank called them following a user-initiated change. (This was in 2013.) The experiment needed to be safe-to-fail, so we crafted the script to check if people had any concerns, we had a clear escalation path for the telesales agent if there were any problems, and they had some Westfield vouchers ready to send if needed.

Outcome: The team made a sale in the first month of their experiment and went on to beat the direct marketing results for that offer.They then proceeded to find and test more 'triggers' for cross-sell. This approach was designed around creating safe-to-fail tests first, to see if they were offering something that people wanted, before they addressed how to scale.

And when customers were questioned whether they felt 'stalked', none of them expressed any concerns and, in fact, a few said that they had expected a call!