How a financial institution used Synthetron’s Customer Mindset Profile method to understand more about the customers’ mindset and adapt its language.
Situation
The financial world has been through a very rough ride in the last 5 years. Many financial service companies have gone under. Others have been re-organized or taken over. Some only survived thanks to state interventions.
In this context, a leading European financial service company wanted to regain customer confidence by aiming for a respectful, meaningful and honest relationship with all their customers. They sought a truly customer-focused approach with behavior linked to the core values of the company.
The management team wanted to go one step beyond the usual insights on customer needs and wanted to understand more about the customers’ mindset and their relationship with financial service companies.
Approach
We set up two Synthetron on-line dialogues. One dialogue was with a group of front-line financial advisors (employees) in daily contact with the customers. The other dialogue was with a representative group of customers.
The topics for the discussions were carefully selected to enable the groups to have free-flowing and rich dialogues with an appropriate level of interaction between the participants in each on-line session. This balanced setup also allows for a gap analysis on the language used by the two groups.
Results
The linguistic analysis revealed some interesting insights. The customer mindset is very much focused on the avoidance of any financial risk. This has clear implications for the communication strategy of the financial service company:
- more focus on the security and stability of the company and less on innovation or being different;
- more focus on what the customer wishes to avoid (instead of what they want),
- more personal, less business-like communication,
- more new financial service opportunities proactively pitched to customers.
Based on these findings the financial service company could put more emphasis on the concerns of the customers, what problems they have, what risks they want to avoid and how the company can help to avoid them.
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