In this blog I will discuss the advantages of actively
engaging both customers and credit controllers to help create the Single
Customer View and how this can give you the best of both worlds in terms of satisfying the customers that you want and protecting your business against fraud.
What does the
customer think about a Single Customer View?
When developing a business case for the Single Customer View
businesses typically focus on what's in it for them in terms of reduced cost,
increased insight into customer behaviour and cross and upsell opportunities.
One of the things that I have learned is that there is also a benefit for the
customer too, and this is supported by research conducted by marketing agencies.
Today’s consumer expects to be recognised and doesn't like being treated as a
number. Most consumers get frustrated with having to maintain multiple
accounts.
There are exceptions, of course. There are always
exceptions. A very important group of customers actively avoids recognition and
will deliberately create multiple accounts. These are the fraudsters who like
your products and services, but don’t like paying for them. Luckily they are in
the minority, but they form a very important minority and it’s important to
protect yourself against them.
Understanding these two groups and foreseeing processes that
allow for both of them is the key to establishing a robust Single Customer View
and maximising the Return on Investment .
Self Service Single
View
One of the biggest challenges in the Single Customer View is
the creation of the so-called Golden Record, or combining all the available
information and selecting the data from all the various records. Although there
are good techniques and tools for automating this, there are always cases where
you just can’t decide. Is the name Marc or Mark? Is the date of birth 7th February or 2nd July? When it comes to the Single Customer View an
option that is easy to overlook is to engage the customer directly by giving
him or her the possibility to edit the data themselves, to confirm and merge
duplicate accounts and to create the golden record for you. Whenever I have
proposed this option there have always been doubts raised about whether
customers care enough to do this, or whether it will annoy them that they are
being asked to “help”, or whether they might abuse it. Yet whenever I have
implemented a solution whereby the customers are actively engaged in this way,
the response is overwhelmingly positive.
The reality is that the majority of your customers do want
you to know them, they do want you to have accurate data on them and they are
more than happy to manage their data for you. After all it's their data and not
yours. So engage them.
Beware the fraudsters
There is a legitimate argument for not allowing customers
unrestricted access to their own data. This argument is typically raised by
credit controllers. They work constantly with customers who can't or won't pay,
and they know all the tricks that the fraudsters employ to avoid having to pay.
Anonymity is one of the fraudster's most useful tricks, and so they
deliberately create multiple accounts, maybe using slightly different names,
dates of birth or addresses. One of the great advantages of creating a Single Customer
View is the ability it gives you to unify these customers' accounts so that you
get a unified view of their debt or risk and can then manage it better.
Obviously if you identify multiple accounts as candidates for merging and you
ask these customers if they are the same, then they will probably say no, and
then maybe make more changes to increase the differences.
Two simple, but
effective techniques
So, if it's a good idea to engage the customer most of the
time, but you don’t want to give the fraudsters any more help, what's the best
approach?
There are two techniques that you can apply that together
will give you the best of both worlds. The first trick is to add a flag to the
customer record that allows you to open or close their access to edit their
data. The default value is open – the customer may edit their own data. If for
any reason, you suspect that a customer may abuse this access, then you set it
to closed, and the option no longer appears to them. It may be possible to
develop rules so that the flag can be automatically opened or closed, but it
must certainly be possible for the credit controllers to modify it by hand and
block suspect customers. The rules for opening it again should be carefully
defined. First line call centre agents, for example, are used to dealing with
the majority of good customers, and you want them to be customer friendly.
Giving them the right to open the editing rights on request may not be the best
option – an escalation to the credit controllers in the back office may be a
better idea. Whatever you decide, the rules for opening and closing access are
important and need to be clear.
The second technique is to engage the credit controllers in
the de-duplication process. Fraudsters will deliberately create multiple accounts
with small differences. As a result their duplicate accounts are not always
easy to spot, and the matching scores are likely to be ambiguous. By using
other criteria such as outstanding debt you can route the de-duplication to
specialist credit controllers for the final decision on whether or not two
accounts should be merged and what the golden record would look like. They will
be more than happy to do this, as it gives them a Single View of Debt. At this
point, they would probably also want to close the edit option for such a
client.
Conclusion
It is possible and desirable to actively engage the customer
when creating a Single View, but doing so can open you up to the fraudsters.
That should be countered by adding a flag to open or close a customer's access
to editing their own data. Furthermore extending the de-duplication processes
to include credit controllers will mean that the Single View actively helps you
better manage the fraudsters rather than allowing them to manage you.
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