Our practice includes experts in top-line growth, innovation, and marketing and sales to help our clients address these shifting dynamics through a variety of strategies:

• Creating customer value. Fundamentally, customers remain loyal because of superior value propositions and experiences. In an environment where consumers often have less wealth, lower incomes, and more debt, maintaining customer loyalty requires shifting priorities from aggressive cross-selling to focusing on meaningful value creation for stretched consumers. Financial institutions are also tapping into new opportunities by helping client companies that are concerned about access to capital and liquidity risk.
• Transforming and segmenting service. Developing effective sales management and retention tools and techniques starts with customer segmentation, service model alignment, and cross-selling.
• Improving channel management. Evaluating and implementing the right product, client, and channel mix (which often require multichannel integration) creates efficiencies and growth. Capturing customer responses to improve new customer acquisition, cross- and up-selling, and client retention is only one part of the puzzle; tracking social network activity can also reveal operational successes and failures and identify unmet needs. Using social networks internally can encourage information sharing among employees about evolving customer needs, new business processes, and other innovations.
• Enhancing marketing effectiveness. In enhancing our clients' marketing return on investment, we focus on optimizing the value proposition and offering for customers, new product development, and channel development and management.
• Refining pricing strategies. Capturing the full value of products and services requires the best pricing strategies, which are based on understanding buyers' decision criteria and the company's competitive positioning. We then help develop pricing capabilities and make additional refinements, drawing on results from pilot programs. We also help overcome traditional challenges to analytic approaches, and take into account current relationships and long-term profitability.
• Managing branding. The branding of financial services and managing its key attributes is center stage in the industry today, as companies dedicate senior-level attention and increased investment to brand-building efforts. Flagship services are often critical to cementing relationships and ensuring customer retention.
• Using customer relationship management (CRM). Planning and implementing intelligent CRM solutions can enhance revenue through IT-enabled, long-term customer satisfaction, with improvements in sales and marketing, and service functions.

New channels, such as partnerships with retailers, are making inroads, and consumers are increasingly using multiple channels. Clearly, many strategies that worked yesterday are fast becoming defunct. Direct-response marketing is often less effective because consumers expect services to be customized for their individual needs.