Mumbai Mirror's 10th August edition has a cover page article that screamed about an ATM that eats up the customer's cash. On reading further, apparently someone had tinkered with the ATM machine such that it would debit a higher amount than what was actually withdrawn. In one of the cases mentioned, the customer withdrew Rs. 10,000 but was debited for Rs. 40,000. Another customer made a transaction of Rs. 50,000 but was debited for Rs. 200,000 thousand.
The article has generated a decent amount of comments on how ATMs are tinkered with.
In all this melee, there was something the bank, in this case Axis Bank, could have done. I am not going to lecture on how ATMs can be made more secured. That is not my area of expertise.
In a career spanning close to two decades, I have delivered multiple projects. As with every software project, the User Acceptance Test phase is the final stage wherein the end users test the software before signing it off for deployment. During every UAT, I always set some ground rules:
1. It is a system made by man and can definitely be broken by man.
2. If your objective is to break the system, you will definitely succeed and it is not a commendable thing to achieve.
I use the same rules for this scenario. The ATM has been designed by man and so can be broken by man. There is a manual process involved where access it permitted to a person and thus opens environment for tinkering.
In line with CRM, the question is what could the Bank have done?
In both cases mentioned, the customer was the one to complain to the bank. No doubt the bank would have refunded the money to the customer. But what about the customer who did not get the SMS message or did not check his account soon enough?
This is a perfect case for event or transaction based analysis. In both scenarios, withdrawal of such a large amount may not have been a regular transaction for the customer. In fact for the second case, withdrawal of Rs. 200,000 may have been a first.
The bank could have analysed the debits for each customer and been able to identify the unusual withdrawal by the customer. Based on past behaviour each customer may have a different threshold for identifying an unusual behaviour. The moment this unusal behaviour was identified, the bank should call the customer and confirm the withdrawal. When the customer denies the transaction, it would point to possible fraud. The bank would have various options now:
-- deactivate the debit card
-- noticing the ATM machine to be the same one, decommission it immediately so more customers do not face the trouble.
From a customer perpsective, the bank could have assured the customer that the transactions will be actively investigated and the amount credited back to the account if valid.
The benefit to the bank was that the customer would be comfortable thinking that the bank is looking into his case as well as the bank could have limited the customers exposed to the fraudulent ATM. And more important, imagine if the press article said -- that the bank identified the fraud and quickly protected more customers from facing the same by blocking the ATM. Now that article would be "priceless".
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Friday, August 05, 2011
Let HRD solve Marketing Issues.....
Recently I viewed the video of the presentation of Deborah Rhodes during her appearance at TED. During the speech she has quoted Malcolm Gladwell stating "The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick". She goes on to state that this occurence "makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions. And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize have solutions." Before I continue with my post, I want anyone who has a woman to love in their life (and thats practically everyone) to view this talk by Deborah titled "A tool that finds 3x more breast tumors, and why it's not available to you."
What Malcolm Gladwell says is so very true. If you look around your office and see groups of people hudled in the conference rooms, there is a 9 out of 10 chance that they belong to the same department. They have probably got together to solve some problem or address some issue related to operations of the department.
Organizations define Key Performance Indicators and allocate them to various departments. So revenue is sales. Costing is finance. and so on.... Thereafter, these KPIs are the babies of each department and no body else is allowed to play with the baby or provide tips to the foster parents.
At one telco, there was a high amount of customer churn in the landline business after the first 3 months of activation. The role of keeping the customer active belonged to the "Retention Department." There was a whole lot of action happening in the retention department. I was called in to see if statistics could play a role. Having just two months of customer behaviour data did not excite he statistician in me. I decided to snoop around while I was at the premises of the company. I was also building CRM processes in line with eTOM for this telco. As part of this assignment, I was walking the process with the team responsible for installing the landline phones at the consumer site. One of this person stated that the sales person would ask the customer to just sign the acquisition form and would fill it up later in the office. While filling the form, the sales person would tick all options and services to be activated. When this person went for installation, the consumer would only be interested in knowing about voice calls since that was all he wanted. However, when the bills came in, the consumer saw an 'inflated' bill since he was also charged for services that he did not need. The installation person stated that he could not help the consumer since the installation process did not allow him to revalidate the consumer services and to deactivate the ones the consumer does not need.
This discussion connected the dots. The consumer saw a high amount on his bill for just 'voice telephony.' To him, the telco was overcharging him. Nobody explained to him the rentals charged for services that were activated for him because the sales person ticked the options in the application form. The consumer got upset over this payment and would request for disconnection in the second month. Before he could be disconnected, the telco required him to pay his outstanding till date. So a second bill was generated. This showed that majority of consumers churned in the third month.
If only, the retention department had involved every one who had a consumer touch point in trying to understand the problem at hand.
For that matter, the Human Resources and Finance departments may also have some solutions to the problems of say, the Marketing department.
What Malcolm Gladwell says is so very true. If you look around your office and see groups of people hudled in the conference rooms, there is a 9 out of 10 chance that they belong to the same department. They have probably got together to solve some problem or address some issue related to operations of the department.
Organizations define Key Performance Indicators and allocate them to various departments. So revenue is sales. Costing is finance. and so on.... Thereafter, these KPIs are the babies of each department and no body else is allowed to play with the baby or provide tips to the foster parents.
At one telco, there was a high amount of customer churn in the landline business after the first 3 months of activation. The role of keeping the customer active belonged to the "Retention Department." There was a whole lot of action happening in the retention department. I was called in to see if statistics could play a role. Having just two months of customer behaviour data did not excite he statistician in me. I decided to snoop around while I was at the premises of the company. I was also building CRM processes in line with eTOM for this telco. As part of this assignment, I was walking the process with the team responsible for installing the landline phones at the consumer site. One of this person stated that the sales person would ask the customer to just sign the acquisition form and would fill it up later in the office. While filling the form, the sales person would tick all options and services to be activated. When this person went for installation, the consumer would only be interested in knowing about voice calls since that was all he wanted. However, when the bills came in, the consumer saw an 'inflated' bill since he was also charged for services that he did not need. The installation person stated that he could not help the consumer since the installation process did not allow him to revalidate the consumer services and to deactivate the ones the consumer does not need.
This discussion connected the dots. The consumer saw a high amount on his bill for just 'voice telephony.' To him, the telco was overcharging him. Nobody explained to him the rentals charged for services that were activated for him because the sales person ticked the options in the application form. The consumer got upset over this payment and would request for disconnection in the second month. Before he could be disconnected, the telco required him to pay his outstanding till date. So a second bill was generated. This showed that majority of consumers churned in the third month.
If only, the retention department had involved every one who had a consumer touch point in trying to understand the problem at hand.
For that matter, the Human Resources and Finance departments may also have some solutions to the problems of say, the Marketing department.
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