£1.65bn is the cost of denying customer choice.

I imagine that Santander is as disappointed as RBS, that their plan to acquire 318 branches and 250,000 small business customers from UK’s state owned bank has collapsed due to a technology issue; A technology issue that most utilities addressed almost 20 years ago.


UK telcos started planning for number portability in the mid 1990’s as they knew they would never grow with out it. After lengthy consultation by UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom, all telcos, including the fledgling start ups and mobile companies had to offer customer portability of their telephone numbers from 19th January 2000.

The deregulation of gas and electricity regulators delivered a similar protocol, enabling customers to switch easily between providers within the terms of their contracts.

While telecoms and utilities companies have come and gone, customer portability being enabler of success or failure, not the root cause. Businesses with the best service and value proposition thrive, regardless of the industry.

Yet the UK retail banking sector has closed its ears to consumer group’s calls for account number portability, and now the whole industry is paying the cost; £1.65bn in RBS case. Had RBS enabled account number portability, the challenge they are facing today in preparing to transfer customers would have already been solved.

This is the ROI case for customer experience and brand. This is the case for delivering the best you can for customers to deliver shareholder value.

So isn’t it time, the new banking regulators take up the mantle for customer choice? Even if it’s just to save the UK retail bank’s shareholders from themselves.

The meaning of communication is the response you get

Business to business marketing professionals are increasingly understanding the value of a content led marketing strategy. 

Charles Green, author of The Trusted Advisor says “Valuable content is the focus of all successful marketing today.”

Engaging current and potential customers through thoughtful and useful content is more powerful than above the line and direct mail. It can be delivered through channels that customers have opted into, removing its disruptive nature, and can much more effectively targeted.

I accept that writing a blog can seem like producing popcorn if are used to delivering more detailed white papers and magazine articles. I accept that a single blog can never give justice to a large and complex topic. I know that blogs are as transient as the paper we use to wrap fish and chips in.

However, I firmly believe the meaning of communication is the response you get, and one of the most effective ways to get an immediate response to a business idea is to publish it as a blog that will resonate with your customers.  

I am not for a moment advocating producing blogs for the sole purpose of provocation, but obtaining a response is a valuable outcome for blogging commercially.  Longer written pieces have their place, and sometimes anything less may seem vacuous. If you are writing to stand out and generate business, a series of regular blogs focused on the audience you want to engage with is powerful way to start. 

Blogs are low cost, fast to produce and an effective way to get some personality onto your business brand.

Don’t just take my word for it. Last week I attended a super seminar at The British library arranged by Kogan Page.

The highlight for me was two experienced and talented commercial content producers Sonja Jefferson and Sharon Tanton, who’s new book Valuable Content Marketing is much longer than this blog, and even more informed.

The social media formula for a successful investment management business

In my first blog for Visible Banking, freshly back from a productive week and a successful event in Australia- I share with investment management firms my formula for achieving success in social media.  Click here

My 3 tips for successful innovation

There are lots of blogs, articles, academic papers, seminars and conventions dedicated to explaining how enterprises should innovate. 

There are even experts, consultancy firms and people like me that have innovation in their job specification.

In fact, a whole industry has been built on the topic. Yet still it eludes most managers and their firms. So just to add to the noise, here are my top three, yes, just three tips on how to innovate in your department.

Innovate when everyone is at his or her cleverest.

We all know, without any shadow of a doubt that ‘we are all clever after the fact.’ So can there possible be any better time to innovate. When something isn’t working or has gone wrong, put your thinking caps on. I know this may sound obvious, but there is a subtle difference in thinking innovatively in this situation and just working out what the heck are we going to do to sort this mess out:

The milk has been spilt, so there is no point crying about it and it can’t get any worse. So let’s get creative, let’s ask whether we should be using milk in the first place.

Ask the people that know best what we should do.

I recently found an amazing piece of insight about a product my firm supplies through analysing unstructured social media data. I validated what I found with the last two years complaints records and found a correlation to inform a business case to change the product feature that caused all of the negative sentiment. Proud of myself I was telling a couple of colleagues in the contact centre about it, and instead of telling me how clever I was, they said ‘oh yeah, we knew that.’

We spend lots of management time and resources trying to figure out how what our customers are thinking, when those people that interact with them every day know. They understand how they feel about us and what their perceptions of us are – but do we ever ask them? Do we spend as much time asking our front line colleagues what they think our customers would think is pretty amazing instead of trying to figure out 40,000 feet from the front line?

It doesn’t matter how many ideas you have.

Successful innovation is not in having the ideas, the insight or data to support the ideas, the business case or the ROI models – it’s in the delivery.

Give the innovation task to the people that deliver. The best innovations in the world are the ones that get delivered; the ones that weren’t delivered are probably all OTE, overtaken by events.

They don’t have to be huge innovations; incremental change is the way of things. It works for Apple and Dell, 3M and GE, some of the greatest innovators in the world. Great leaps like landing a man on the moon relied on hundreds of small incremental innovations, like a pen that works in space (a pencil of you’re a Russian astronaut).

So innovation is simple:

Do it when it’s all gone tits up, ask the people closest to the most important people in the business, customers, and ask someone you know can deliver to do it.