Do You Face a "Growing" Problem?

"… many financial services companies are mistaking customer inertia for loyalty."

--BearingPoint

There is an ad running on TV right now about how some men in their 40s and beyond face "a growing problem." I'm reminded of it when I see the current campaign on the BrearingPoint website promoting the firm's partnership with Google. Under the heading, "The Growing Information Problem" is an image of a knowledge worker, clearly frustrated, as he searches the contents of an open file cabinet drawer while his computer sits useless in the background.

Get it? The cause of the problem is growing, so the problem is growing.


Meanwhile, on its Executive Insight landing page BearingPoint is promoting a white paper titled: "Wake-Up Call: To Fix CRM, Fix the Customer Experience Now!" Financial services customers face a growing problem of their own -- the proliferation of confusing service options and data that CRM systems throw at them. Those customer are not happy -- and that's a growing problem too for the banks, insurance companies, mutual fund companies, and other members of the sector that have invested billions to build those systems.

The common thread here is that users don't care about the plumbing (so to speak). All they care about is relieving the discomfort when the plumbing doesn't work. That picture of a frustrated knowledge worker at the office could just as easily be the picture of a high net worth individual at home pulling together the information he needs to do his taxes.

There is an important difference, however, between a pharmaceutical company's TV ad and IT thought leadership. In the first case, when someone says they're having a bad experience, you know exactly what they're talking about. In the second, that's not always clear. A lot more needs to be said and written about how IT infrastructure decisions impact real users. And in a lot more graphic detail.

As many financial service companies have discovered, leaving it up to angry users to describe those details -- and only after these decisions have already been made -- may not be the best way to go.