In a competitive market, the winning edge can often come from finding a unique way to deliver a truly VIP customer experience.
Spouse Alert is the name of a service one of our customers offered to their VIP's using the real-time transaction information available through Prognosis. Because it was possible to see both the primary and secondary cardholder's real-time transactions, they offered their premium black card customers the option to receive an alert if their spouse's spending reached a certain daily threshold.
Funnily enough, our CEO at the time was banking with one of these organizations. One day, we were sitting in a meeting room when his phone awoke with a new text message. His wife had gone to the mall and put a run on his card. It was quite amusing for everyone in the meeting room to observe this as it happened.
Features like Spouse Alert are a fitting illustration of how an organization has looked beyond the technology itself. Instead of merely implementing a system to prevent fraudulent transactions, they were able to deliver a differentiating service to customers that made them feel like they were being treated as a VIP.
There is a growing trend in the industry where fraud prevention and customer satisfaction overlap. In that grey zone is where companies are getting their customers to participate in preventing fraudulent transactions. Text, email, or push notification alerts could be based on card-not-present transactions or transactions that exceed a certain amount.
There is a layer of intelligence that begins by telling the customer when an event has occurred. It can then evolve to only telling when the transaction is fraudulent. Finally, if focus is placed on a delightful customer experience, the customer can be alerted to personally meaningful information tailored to their interests or needs. Even though the information has no significance to the financial institution directly, it does have significance by proxy, to their customers.
There is detailed information about every transaction, such as the currency type or the industry where the transaction took place. Using that data, consumers may wish to be alerted if purchases were made using a foreign currency, or if their monthly purchases at restaurants have become excessive. Consumers may regularly make purchases exceeding $200 at grocery stores, but only wish to be alerted for high value purchases in other industries.
Even though there are important metrics that are often used for fraud prevention, it is possible to look beyond fraud and focus on the consumer's preferences.
The key is to have an efficient real-time engine that is able to examine high volumes of data based on configurable rule sets. With a product like Prognosis, real-time analytics and in-memory correlations are extremely efficient and scalable for even the largest institutions.
Spouse Alert is one great example of how an organization found a way to differentiate themselves to their customers by effectively leveraging technology. Their business decision was based upon providing the consumer with a delightful experience. It is these types of innovations that will become more prevalent as credit and debit card issuers seek to find those unique ways to differentiate themselves.
What are some of the innovations you would like to see card issuers offer? Or that you may already be receiving that helped influence your decision to go with one provider versus another.