74 percent of respondents indicate they would be more likely to buy products and services from their financial services companies if the offers were relevant and personalized

BURLINGTON, Mass.--StreamServe® Inc., the global leader in Enterprise Document Presentment (EDP), today released the results of its financial services customer satisfaction survey. The results show that firms are missing a tremendous opportunity to enhance customer value by failing to communicate with their clients in a relevant, personal manner.

The goal of the online survey was to understand how customers perceive account and promotional communication materials (letters, brochures, email, etc.) received from a range of financial services companies. Two hundred financial services customers in the United Kingdom participated in the survey.

Survey results indicate that the majority of financial services companies fail to effectively communicate and market products and services to existing customers, causing these organizations to miss an opportunity to increase revenue and improve customer service. Seventy-four percent of respondents indicate they would be more likely to buy products and services from financial companies if the offers were highly personalized, relevant and treated them as individuals.

StreamServe EDP software enables organizations to enhance the value of their customer relationships by presenting a persuasive, consistent and personalized experience across all communication channels. StreamServe Persuasion, the newly released version of StreamServe EDP, permits companies to take information from enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, SCM and legacy systems, and transform it into business correspondence that acts as a dynamic and personalized marketing vehicle for cross-sell, up-sell and brand building.

As a result, companies are able to profit from what they know about their customers by maximizing the last mile of communication with their customers.

Financial services customers regularly receive communications for products or services that are not relevant to their needs, or even worse, communications that promote products and services they already have through that company. Consequently, 59 percent of financial services consumers who responded to the survey claim they don’t feel valued when it comes to the communication of products and services from their existing providers.

Among the key findings:

• 88 percent of financial consumers claim to receive regular communications for products and services that are NOT directly relevant to them and their circumstances.
• 64 percent of financial consumers claim they are more likely to stop using companies that regularly send them inaccurate or irrelevant communications material.
• 65 percent of financial consumers don’t feel like they are being treated as an individual with regard to the communications they receive.
• Well over half (56 percent) of all financial consumers say they are less likely to buy from companies that send them information on products and services that are irrelevant to them.
• More than half of financial consumers (58 percent) claim to regularly receive communications selling them products and services they already have with that company.
• 71 percent of financial consumers claim to regularly receive documents from the same company at the same time in different envelopes.

“People are bombarded with information, so companies must find a way to cut through the clutter by demonstrating immediate relevance to their customers,” said Chris Stone, president and CEO of StreamServe. “This requires personalized information. Companies have invested a significant amount of time and money collecting information about their customers, and with StreamServe, they finally have the ability to benefit from these efforts by putting content in context—making each piece of communication personalized to each customer’s specific needs.”

Methodology

StreamServe hired Nutshell Research to conduct primary research among 200 financial services customers in the United Kingdom. The research focused purely on communications received from companies the customers have an existing relationship with, including products such as current accounts, savings, mortgages, credit cards, loans and insurance. Survey respondents selected one of four choices for each question: strongly agree, strongly disagree, slightly agree or slightly disagree.

About StreamServe Inc.

StreamServe Enterprise Document Presentment™ (EDP) software enables the world’s leading companies to communicate effectively with their customers, partners and suppliers through the automated creation and presentment of documents in any format and channel. StreamServe’s EDP solutions enable more than 4,500 customers in 130 countries to present a full range of interactive, electronic and print-based documents generated by enterprise applications. Customers include leading global companies such as Bayer, BMW, CLP Power Hong Kong, Circuit City and DaimlerChrysler Bank. StreamServe is headquartered in Burlington, MA, and has 15 offices worldwide. For additional information, please visit www.streamserve.com.