By Andy Davies, Financial Institutions Relationship Manager at Estatetrace
Why Gone Away Customers Matter
On average, people move up to eight times in their lifetime and change jobs even more frequently. It’s no surprise, then, that important documents can be misplaced and connections with financial institutions become lost over time. Yet eventually, it becomes the responsibility of those institutions to trace these so-called ‘gone away’ customers. That’s where gone away customer tracing becomes essential — helping reconnect people with their financial assets.
Starting with a Proof of Concept
The necessary investment in tracing such customers can be significant if customer books are large. Therefore, we often undertake smaller proof of concept projects so managers can present the business case to c-suite executives to consider investment in more comprehensive gone away customer tracing projects.
A Recent Project with a Major Building Society
We have recently completed such a project on behalf of a large building society. As many businesses do, they had ring-fenced an exploratory budget to evaluate the effectiveness of an enhanced tracing project with Estatetrace. Previously, they had relied solely on a credit reference agency, but this had not yielded the results they had hoped for.
Sampling for Credibility
The building society supplied us with 500 randomly selected customers who they had been unable to reach, from a data set of 30,000 dormant accounts. A database of this size is not at all unusual for a large financial institution. The important point is that the customer data was random and meant the sample was as credible as possible. Customers were taken from different parts of the business — some were newer and some older — to show a true picture of how successful an enhanced tracing project could be; helpful should the building society decide to invest in tracing the remainder of the data set in the future.
Delivering Transparent Results
At Estatetrace, we always like to be transparent. An estimate of a 60% success rate — where we are able to supply updated contact information or confirm if a customer has passed away and trace the estate’s executors — would be viewed as a good outcome.
For this project, within 3 weeks, we were able to trace 78% of the gone away customers. From these subjects, we confirmed that 20% were deceased and we were able to supply the contact details of the representatives of the estate for 85% of these.
Data Delivered on Your Terms
The results of our enhanced tracing services are returned to the client in whatever format the data set is supplied, to make the process of re-integration as easy as possible. In this case, an Excel spreadsheet was used so data could easily be ingested back into the building society’s system.
Why the Project Was So Successful
There are a few reasons why this project was so successful. I believe the spread of customers was genuine, while a high proportion had passed away leaving a paper trail for us to follow and trace the estate’s representatives. Further, as we continue to develop and enhance our own tracing techniques, we are becoming more successful too.
Making the Case for Larger Investment
The building society’s team members were ‘surprised and pleased’ and this now means they can address the much larger data set — confident they can work with us to trace the rest of their gone away customers.
For any financial institution to re-engage with 30,000 customers will require significant investment. A client will approach us when they have identified a gone away customer tracing challenge, and we often advise proof of concept projects to support investment decisions and reduce any potential friction when recommendations are presented to senior management for consideration.