The talk about the HDFC 40% Faster Withdrawal at ATM's is all over the place in India. They are reaching out customers through all possible channels television, print media, and the local radio stations with the message. Interesting point here is that an ATM add on service is being marketed as a differentiation. Times are changing and people are becoming creative and why not. When Thumbs Up can taste like thunder for years now, axe can actually make people attractive and pull girls closer to them – why can’t an ATM be 40% faster.
Let's look at the details of this "40% Faster Feature". Most probably this would have implemented as a favorite amount to a customer profile. An ATM card belongs to a customer. We all know that it is very rare that more than one person operates a particular card (as per the standard SOP - only one person should be using any individual ATM card"). The significant point here is that usually there is a pattern around our ATM withdrawals. For example, I usually withdraw around two thousand bucks and typically there are four to five visits to the ATM in a month. The ATM prompts to save the transaction as favorite every time you withdraw and for example ideally speaking as per HDFC I should set this two thousand amount as my favorite amount. Next time when I am at this ATM, it gives me an option to perform my favorite withdrawal and saves me the hassle of keying in two thousand i.e. the number 2000 and pressing an enter key. My normal ATM transaction averages one minute and worst case one and half minutes. The point to note here is that the longer transactions are probably because of wrong credentials (PIN) or the problem with the card reader and sometimes network. It would be really interesting to know if this “40%” can change that one min transaction to 0.6 seconds.
Let’s look at a typical cash withdrawal cycle, when someone transacts at an ATM - we swipe/slot our card and proceed with providing the PIN. Next we need to identify the type of transaction we want to do. For a particular types of ATM this layout rarely changes and within seconds one clicks on "Cash Withdrawal" or "Fast Cash" and on is prompted a screen to enter the amount and confirm it. A request is sent to the bank and if the authentication goes through and ATM receives a confirmation that funds are available we are done.
This whole new feature is around saving this another attribute of favorite amount on the card or elsewhere and retrieving it when the card is used. The flow would have been modified but genuinely speaking this is much trivial or rather time saving as compared to hundred of bleeding edge things that we use to save our precious time.
Second part here is where the number “40%” faster comes from? People who were transacting first time at ATM’s, people who are not very computer or ATM friendly. There would be some small caption available somewhere based on some study. We have become so used to these calculated / invented /inferred statistics that rather than reading through the whole report and crunching numbers and break our head to verify the numbers, we just believe them.
Reminds me of the joke someone shared long time back in the market research class, based on the low number of people who wore shoes amongst a sample population two market research companies inferred that “since people hardly wore shoes there was no market for shoes” vs. “since people hardly wear shoes there was a huge potential market”. It’s interesting how HDFC is actually claiming this is a big differentiator that they have as part of great service. This service and investment changes the way they target there customer but hardly makes a difference to us most of the times.
There are more marketing gimmicks in the market today then the facts. Even the facts which are presented are so distorted a times and presented in way that they are always as interesting as a mini skirt which reveals so much to makes it interesting for the mind to fantasize about what it actually hides. The point is if Steve Jobs can do it over and over again why shouldn’t the HDFC try; it might not be a totally bogus game and could actually be few percent faster.
Today retailers are doing much more complicated things - they have much more complicated CRM which are assisting them target specific campaigns to us. The salesman in a high end specialty shoe retailer never asks for the shoe size or the collar size - all he needs to do is look into our buying history and retailers never tell us that they are doing this. It just happens silently and comes to us as a nice welcome gesture that "they know us". Retailer’s haven’t reached there but very soon the moment we walk into a store the salesman with a hand-held device would be able to know my size, my choices, my last five big ticket purchases and recommendation. Amazon is already there with their targeted e-mails – they keep bombarding me with high end camera accessories because I browsed them few times. Retailers are already doing closed door sales events where only people with specific buying patterns get invited.
Having said all that HDFC actually has statistics to quote their claims. I presume we all assumed they would have having these support statistics. The ATM’s have been supplied for NCR Corporations and the software they are using is “Aptra eMarketing”. Quoting (courtesy Google) Mr. Rahul Bhagat, Country Head for Retail Liabilities, Marketing and Direct Banking Channels for HDFC - “This initiative will shorten the time taken for cash withdrawals at our ATM sites since 45% of our customers use ATM services, 80% of them withdraw the same amount every time and 97% of ATM transactions are done either to withdraw cash or inquire account balances. On an average, each HDFC Bank ATM registers 310 transactions per day”. We will be able to target customers now with customer specific programs and messages but aren’t there things beyond that?
Have we ever wondered that we can leverage our ATM’s to sell phone cards, pre-paid recharge, pre-paid gift cards, train tickets, airline tickets, movie tickets, gift vouchers. All that can be displayed on the screen or printed on the receipt and for which payment needs to be collected – we have the facility to do all this. We already have the infrastructure and bandwidth – even if we don’t have we still have 3100 ATM’s and we can fix hours for these extra value services because all our ATM’s are empty in the nights and usually have staggered traffic patterns.
References:
a) HDFC Bank Upgrade- http://www.topnews.in/hdfc-bank-upgrade-atm-network-293033
b) Business Intelligence Journal - Impact Of ATM On Customer Satisfaction (A Comparative Study of SBI, ICICI & HDFC bank) - Sultan Singh, Ms. Komal, (Ph.D.) http://www.saycocorporativo.com/saycoUK/BIJ/journal/Vol2No2/article2.pdf
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