| By Jim Bruene on September 19, 2007 2:49 PM | Comments (1) |
In all the discussions about mobile banking — will it be text-based, go through a mobile website, or do 225 million U.S. mobile phones all have to download some sort of an app — there is little discussion on an obvious use case, voice to text.
The only person I've heard talking about this publicly is Richard Crone of Crone Consulting, a fixture on the conference circuit, and the keynoter at SourceMedia's Mobile eCommerce conference in June (see our previous coverage here).
Here's what I want my bank, card company, and credit union to offer (assumes my mobile phone is registered with my bank):
Call my bank's 800 number from my mobile phone, then without touching the keypad, simply say "text me" and hang up (or for multiple account holders, "text me checking," "text me credit card," and so on). Or if background noise is bad or the connection isn't clear, let me press a single number on the first VRU tree that triggers the same text message.
Then, the bank sends me an SMS message with my current and available balance and last ten transactions, or whatever else would fit in the 160 character message. Ideally, I could text back to get more transactions or even make a transfer. But I'll take just the simple one-way message for now.
Would I pay for it? No. But I'm not the core market, since I'm online 24/7. But if I'm a a twenty-something, on the go and managing my account to the last $25 every week, a reasonable fee ($0.25) per message would seem fair. Would it decrease overdraft income? Yep, some. But you'd have a happier customer and potentially some decreased call center expenses.
Zillow Example
While I don't know any banks using this approach, Jott, which is a voice-to-text Web 2.0 company, recently used Zillow's API to offer voice-to-text delivery of home values (see Zillow blog post here). After registering with the sites, users can call J
ott, say an address, and receive a text message with the estimated home value of the property. While this is not exactly a mainstream app, it's surely valuable for real estate agents, home buyers, and nosy neighbors.
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Jim, you bring up an interesting point regarding the importance of cross channel integration as it relates to mobile banking. The Zillow.com use case makes sense, given that addresses are long and cumbersome to text in to a mobile device. However, some existing text banking solutions are just as easy as the voice-to-text banking example. In your banking example, a customer calls his bank to request a text then gets back a full text message with a list of account information. You can easily accomplish the same task with a one-letter text message – text “B” to get account balance, “L” to get last transactions – and get a text message back with just the information you want.
An even more compelling feature than voice-to-text already exists, and that’s text-to-voice. If a customer has a request that needs to be serviced by a live agent, he could simply text the bank “c” or “call me”. The customer gets a text message back with an estimated call back time, can go about his business and receives a call back from a live bank representative. This results in an enhanced customer experience (imagine never having to wait on hold!) and provides a strong call center cost savings ROI for the bank.
While cross channel integration is important, existing mobile banking solutions (like text messaging and “call me”) are just as easy, and arguably, can make for even happier customers, than a voice-to-text solution.