How to make information affect behaviour?

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I read an interesting article on how data which is coverted into information affects behaviour. Most often, all data analyzed and presented as information to users or even to customers may not necessarily have the desired impact to affect behaviour.

Here are some interesting perspectives and points that we need to think to help present data in a manner that can seriously help people change behaviour: 

1. Intuit/Mint are great examples of customers having their financial data(online) of where they spend their monies and how they invest & save. By uploading this data, do people change their behaviour to either spend less or save more? - Mint definitely believes so. According to Mint, they started as analysis tool but slowly progressed into providing insights to customers on their current behaviour and promoting actions that affect behaviour!
   
2. The question really is if data can help change behaviour, how do we present this data so that it really has a telling impact on the customers/users who are using it?
   

       The idea data according to this article that can help this is:

      a. Passive data ( The user has nothing to do with this data)

      b. Non-invasive

      c. Real-time

      d. Focussed ( Like a dashboard with key metrics)

      e. Linked in real-time to the desired effect

      f. Simple to gain insight and understand

      g.Linked to private and personal benefits ( Weight loss/gain)

      h. Linked to public benefits ( Reduces carbon footprint)

      i  Quirky positive feedback

      j. Non-threatening negative feedback

      k. Socially connected to take advantage of human nature

This led me to think how we present various data to our stakeholders across businesses and user departments today. We still have a long way to go especially given the fact that discovery of insights after mining the data, needs to be presented well for it to change behaviour across an organization. Also, if we want customers to either buy from us more or recommend alternative products or services, it needs to be done a lot more intuitively by presenting the facts & insights well to get them to consider our recommendation.   

Are ATM's Irrelevant!

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I recently read a blog post which said that ATMs would now be irrelevant! I could not disagree with it more!

http://www.cashcow.in/index.php/2009/07/23/the-growing-irrelevance-of-the-atm-network/

For many of us, the ATM has become the true face of our bank. We hardly walk into our branch but we often use the ATM. Colin Henderson has this very interesting post which centres on the reality that with each transaction, a consumer is making a decision about their banking service.

“ What has really happened is that the product experience has transferred from the old view of product, the bank account, to the new view, which is the experience. The experience occurs at the ATM, the POS terminal, the online banking session, the iphone app (oops you haven’t got that!). The customer experience is in the use of the account, not in the interest rate. That rate stuff is relegated to another mind space that is related to return and investment quality. That other mind space is critical, but not at the point of transactional experience.”

Read more of Colin’s comments at:

http://thebankwatch.com/2009/07/29/bring-the-banking-experience-forward-to-the-transactional-experience/

Whereas the first ATM’s in the United States appeared in the 1960’s, the ATM is a fairly new phenomenon in India. The total number of ATMs in India, a country of 1.15 billion people, has increased approximately 30% this year to 40,000, mainly in urban areas. By contrast, in the United States with a population of only 305 million people, ATMs are ubiquitous. Their number peaked at 395,000 in 2005. 

The Reserve Bank of India, which tightly regulates the ATM business, ruled in 2008 that banks could not charge depositors from other Indian banks more than 20 rupees (about $.10) for a cash withdrawal, and that they would have to eliminate even this fee by April of 2009, which apparently they did. Last month, however, the RBI modified its decree to permit banks to charge up to 20 rupees per transaction starting in October if a customer of another bank uses its ATM’s more than five times in a month. Have a look at this interesting analysis:

http://www.glgroup.com/News/Indian-ATM-Sharing-Reminiscent-of-Earlier-US-Pattern-42807.html

My take is as follows:

1. ATMs are a huge opportunity for banks and can become an intelligent channel for cross selling . Imagine the opportunity to present personalized cross sell messages at the ATMs for a bank the size of an HDFC bank which runs 3,100 ATMs pan India with a daily turnover of 300 transactions per day per ATM, which adds up to about one million transactions per day.
2. Analytics can help in creating a “Next product purchase” framework which determines a customer’s propensity for purchase of another product.  Basis this a centralized Campaign can be pushed out to the customer at the ATM point.
3. Analytics can also play a very important role in determining a location strategy for ATMs. What is needed is a way by which external data at a pin code level can be aggregated which includes locations & transaction volumes of competing banks and profile information at a pin code level. This along with the banks transactional data can help in analyzing a pin code level strategy for ATM deployment.