The final keynote before lunch featured Sylvia Reynolds, CMO, Wells Fargo. Sylvia's session also dealt with customer centricity (sense a trend here).
Sylvia started with a few basic questions: What is customer-centricity? If this is so important why haven't we been talking about this before? Are all these new technologies (blogs, podcasts, etc) enablers or distractions?
Sylvia provided some stats about Well Fargo and how they interact with their customers. Wells Fargo has 23 millions costumers with millions of interactions with them via stores, on-line, phone and ATM.
What's important to realize is that in their history Wells Fargo has always been focussed on the customer, it's just now called customer-centricity.
Sylvia joked that a customer has never asked Wells Fargo to be more centric.
Wells Fargo has been very successful, so it's difficult for Sylvia to convince management that they need to change they way they do things. From management's perspective, if they weren't doing things for the customer already, then they wouldn't be successful.
The new goal is to manage sideways. Wells Fargo is looking to build customer experience across their 80 channels. That's the challenge.
Sylvia asks, "How many of you have been in a meeting where somebody talked about the 'customer' and they inserted their own preferences?" Do they really know the customer?
All the new technologies are exciting, but use the new technology to solve real problems.
At first collaboration between departments was for mutual benefit. Cross-sell is a religion within Wells Fargo. The new approach is to build collaboration with the customer's needs first, then internal benefit second. The new directive: Make our shared customer the center of all decisions. Nobody 'owns' the customers.
Wells Fargo is starting to use campaigns that connect to larger customer issues/dreams. This is a departure from 'product' marketing.
Wells Fargo is also trying new forms of marketing: blogs, events, Second Life. However, the use of new technologies is rooted in solving a problem. They discovered that people under 18 didn't know about Wells Fargo's history, or felt it made them look old. With the Guided by History blog they are trying to make the history of Wells Fargo relevant, hip and current.
