360 degree view is overrated

I've been struggling with this whole concept behind having a 360 degree view of the member. I think it's overrated and I'll tell you why. When a member comes into the branch to deposit their check or calls into the call center seeing if a check is cleared; the employee who is taking care of providing the service. Are they going look at all this information? I don't think so. The fact is; seat time with members is limited. On the teller line, you have maybe a minute or two, the call center perhaps two to five minutes. Who's got time to look at and process all this information?

I've also heard about building member value and/or loyalty scores. Basically, this is a score that tells the employee how loyal and/or profitable a member is to the organization. The result of this score determines what we can and can't do for the member. In some cases, how we treat the member. I think this is a huge mistake. What if a member has a low score? Will the employee then write the member off and not provide the same level of service that a member with a high score would get? It could happen and I bet has happened.

I'm not advocating doing away with member loyalty and/or profitability scores. I'm advocating not providing them to the employees. Take the business intelligence and have the system advise an employee when they're doing actionable services. If an employee is given some metric that determines the value of the member, service levels will decline. Especially on those members who have low scores. Let's not knock those members down, lets build them up. Just because they have a low score now does not mean they'll have one five years from now. They will remember the day when you didn't reverse the NSF fee for some policy reason.

I think we need to tell the 360 degree view to go take a hike. I say less but relevant information is better. If you talk with employees in your call center they will tell you that they don't want everything. They just want to be able to track interactions. In other words, who said what and when, what is done and what needs to be done, and so on. They want less account centric systems and more member centric systems. They want systems that will act as an advisor instead of a data warehouse.

Keep it simple and efficient and no one will get hurt.