At yesterday’s Executives’ Club of Chicago’s Global Leaders Luncheon, Discover Financial Services Chairman and CEO David Nelms said six words that should light a fire under any business that has been slow to adopt a mobile strategy: Everything is moving to the phone.
Citing younger demographics’ preference for digital banking over physical branches, as well as the sharp focus that is beginning to be placed on elevating the customer experience, Nelms was unwavering in his respect for smartphones and the enormous impact they’re having on the financial services industry, as well as others.
Smartphones are transforming commerce. They create the seamless transactions that consumers expect, Nelms said, also emphasizing the role smartphones play in the explosion of data that businesses have available to them, which he calls more enabling and more valuable than anyone could have imagined. Data, he says, has the ability to put the right information in front of the right consumer at the right time.
Smartphones then make it possible to get that consumer in front of the right representative of a business at the right time: with call tracking tools, the ability to track the ad, web page, keyword, etc. that drove a consumer to make a call has never been more within businesses’ grasp, and call management solutions make it possible for those calls to be routed to the agent, department, or geographical location best suited to turn that call into a happy customer.
And Discover is aware of the importance of happy customers. 69% of customers rate live assistance with the highest satisfaction, and Nelms seems to have had this in mind; paying special mention to Discover’s We treat you like you’d treat you commercials, in which the quality of their call centers and customer experience is the selling point (a marketing theme started by State Farm).
Hearing Nelms speak on his respect and understanding of the role the phone plays in today’s commerce environment, though, deepens the impact of these commercials: We treat you like you’d treat you isn’t just a clever customer service one-liner; it’s a philosophy that may just define the future of how businesses approach customer experience, and the tools they use to do it.