I spent this morning wrapping up a freelance writing assignment on marketing banking services to the Web 2.0 generation. You might think there’s little in common between the banking and web hosting industries, but this IBM report convinced me otherwise.
Last fall, IBM conducted a survey of 3,000 banking customers:
* 74% found banks’ marketing offers irrelevant
* 64% felt bank employees did not listen to their needs
* 50% would not consider using their current banks for other products and services
IBM says while banks have enhanced customer service through technology investments and operational improvements, they haven’t paid enough attention to customer attitudes related to their banking experience. The study shows that even though banks meet rational expectations 52% of the time, they deliver emotive satisfaction only 26% of the time. IBM concludes that what customers want are banking providers that understand their goals and challenges and provide relevant advice.
If you replace “banking” with “hosting” in the previous two paragraphs, I think IBM’s survey results would have remained the same. Most of the dedicated server customers I’ve sold to don’t know what “3000 GB of bandwidth” means. They’re not sure what the difference is between Dual Xeon and Woodcrest, SCSI and SATA, or Plesk and cPanel. What they want is “a solution that’s worked well for sites like ours”.
You’d score on IBM’s “CFiq” (it stands for Customer Focused Insight Quotient) scale if you took time to learn about their business. And you’d win “advocates” (the highest tier on the study’s satisfaction scale) if you could offer useful data that’s relevant to their particular situation. And sell them products that solve common problems within their sub-market. In other words, segmentation is a must for both banking and web hosting success.
Gartner, too, offers banking advice that’s also relevant to web hosting. Its analysts identified three trends that will change the banking landscape:
(a) Increasing cross-border migrations make multinational banking capabilities (and content distribution networks) a must;
(b) Stiffer competition creates zero sum markets; one provider’s gain translates immediately into another’s loss (same for us); and
(c) faster access to information (via social networking services, for instance) shifts power from vendors to buyers, who will rely increasingly on each other’s opinions rather than marketing communication for decision making.
As with IBM, Gartner says one winning strategy is to emphasize customer relationships.
