Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Would you speak a bit more specifically on what your assumptions are in that regard? Are you trying to create a social decision making platform under the Wells Fargo website itself, or are you trying to create conversations or touch points to the conversations that are happening on Facebook and Twitter and so forth? How do you do it?

Mark McCormick: Let’s put social aside for a second because that was just an example of how we might think about that particular task. I think a more interesting task to think about and look at how technology enables the task in a different way is deposits. For example, people will always have a need to deposit their checks, but the way they expect to do that will change. We can look back to when people used to stand in the teller line and do it with a banker. You can still do that. Some customers still prefer to do that. But we enabled the technology to do it through our ATMs, and then we enabled the technology to do it through our ATMs without envelopes.

Now, we just announced that we’re piloting, in some states, the technology that will allow customers to deposit through their mobile phones. People can just take pictures of their checks and deposit them virtually into their accounts. That’s a better, more specific example of how we’re using new technology to enable old tasks.

SM: I’m actually very interested in pursuing the social conversation as well. We see financial services adopting social media technologies quite seriously. We have a company in One Million by One Million that provides a platform for social CRM. They are seeing traction in international services. That’s a conversation that’s coming up quite often, whether it’s on the customer support side and answering questions, turning expert users into, let’s say, level-zero customer support reps and stuff like that. Interesting new use models are emerging, so I’m curious. Are you seeing any of those or toying with any of those things?

MM: Yes, definitely. We think of the social realm very broadly. We think of it as everything, such as online communities. We’ve been experimenting with that and establishing a solid presence in the blogosphere and different sorts of branding things for a long time with our Guided By History blog. A lot of people are interested in the Wells Fargo history, so we created a community just around that. That was an early foray into the social world, and it’s still a vibrant community. We also think of social – more to your point – as a listening platform. We’re attuned to and always monitoring what people are saying about Wells Fargo in the social world, whether that’s through Twitter or on blogs and that sort of thing. Our Twitter channel is very active. We use that as both a way of connecting to our customers and solving specific problems that our customers might be having. If somebody tweets about Wells Fargo, either to thank us for something or to compliment us or perhaps describe an issue that they’re having, we are responsive to those kinds of things. We also have a Facebook page that is pretty active. We’re always looking, trying to figure out what kinds of content that community might want from us.

SM: We are seeing the trend of depositing checks using mobile phones elsewhere as well. Those are interesting new trends. What else do you see? Are there other things on your radar, interesting adoptions of technology or trends that you are monitoring or leading?

MM: There are so many. One trend that you might be aware of is that people are interested in tracking their finances. We saw Mint, for example, make a great play there. What’s interesting about that and what I think the web is changing – again, expectations change – people expect more visual displays of their quantitative information. We’re always looking for ways to represent for customers in graphic ways that are also actionable how they’re spending their money. We’re interested in helping our customers succeed financially. We know that by showing them views of their spending and helping them track their finances toward goals that we help them set up, then we’re ultimately helping our customers succeed financially.

I think customers expect more of these easy to use, integrated tools with their accounts. That’s why a lot of people are choosing to use our tools instead of going offline to something like Mint. But I do think that Mint really raised the bar on how customers expect to see this information displayed graphically. That’s another example of a trend that we’re following, and similarly rich interaction with data. People don’t want to see long tables or amortization data, for example. They want to be able to move a line in a graph or change some numbers and see everything change dynamically, so, rich in applications and interactivity with those kinds of things. We’re always working with that.

We’re also doing a lot with the way that people transfer money to each other, the way people expect to instantly send and receive money. Enabling that on the mobile phone, for example, is another way in which we’re adapting to our customers’ expectations. We’re making it easy for people transfer money directly via their mobile phones to somebody with or without a Wells Fargo account. That’s pretty innovative, I think.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo
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