Summary
A Fortune 100 company wanted to understand how their competitors are cross-selling high-margin retirement and other financial products and services effectively, without incurring additional customer acquisition cost and without getting into any legal trouble for using personal data of their clients.
The Challenge
Rising fee pressure is adversely impacting the profitability of US retirement firms. Therefore, firms are exploring ways to improve their bottom line by looking at ways to increase revenue while reducing cost at the same time.
On the other hand, increasing number of employers in the US are offering or plan to offer workplace benefits and financial wellness programs to their employees that complement retirement planning and investment help. Many employers turn to their retirement plan service providers to do that work.
The client, who is a retirement plan service provider, had the expertise as well as access to employee data that can yield information on their service needs and funding goals, but did not know how they can leverage this data to cross-sell
The client also wanted to explore the ways in which they can overcome cross-selling challenges like catering to various demands of different clients, not knowing the specific customer needs/requirements, timing the product promotion, ways to communicate or channel of such communication, etc.
Our Solution
Our team tracked the websites, social media handles, recordkeeping contracts, agreement, participant communications and privacy policies of competitors to identify and analyze the methods in which they are cross selling, such as:
- Offering additional services
- Provide complementary items (bundle sales)
- Making data-driven suggestions and matching products and services with client goals
- Educating clients and ensuring that they completely understand the value of the suite of services
Evalueserve also looked at how competitors are strategizing their moves by tracking:
- When and at what stage of the relationship the competitors were reaching out to clients
- How are they communicating, channels used, kind of campaigns they are running
- How are they staying in contact with their customers in a non-intrusive way
Business Impact
- Increased sales as probability of selling new services to an existing client is at least 3 times greater than selling to a new customer
- Lower customer acquisition cost
- Improved brand stickiness due to bundled services
