Business Problem
Like many banks, this community bank used paper forms to document why customers close accounts. The forms were to be completed in the branches, faxed to the back office, and tracked in a master spreadsheet. Yet, this process rarely happened. The first thing the bank and FI Works set out to do was initiate a campaign that would more effectively track why customers were leaving. The ultimate goal was to determine what they could do to proactively reduce attrition.
Solution
Even though Win-back campaigns can have marginal results because of reasons not controllable by the bank, FI Works’ first step was to set up a campaign that would help the bank understand why it was losing accounts. There was particular interest in checking account attrition. FI Works automated the process, so that when an account was closed, a task was generated and sent to a banker to simply select one of 15 reasons from a drop-down list. Surely, making the process automated and timely (the day after an account was closed) would give us better information we needed to save accounts, right? Wrong. It became clear that the bankers didn’t know why accounts were being closed.
Campaign Details
The Win-back campaign was driven out to the branch channel to improve the collection process of the real reasons customers were closing accounts. Daily task lists and tracking the bankers’ activities uncovered valuable perspective that empowered the bank to improve its customer retention. The details of the campaign are outlined below:
