Boost bottom line and customer satisfaction with e-delivery
Carpenter Group helped Ameriprise Financial drive enrollment in e-delivery of account documents.
Situation
How can we cut fulfillment costs and improve our clients’ experience?
The message from financial advisors and clients was clear: Ameriprise needed to reduce the amount of paper it was sending to its customers. While Ameriprise welcomed the potential cost savings from e-delivery of account documents, it faced a host of hurdles, ranging from meeting SEC e-delivery requirements to the technical implementation and getting customer buy-in. Changing customer behavior posed the most significant challenge. Studies show that only 8% of households actually shift to an online-only communications relationship. Instead, the majority opt to receive the same communications both electronically and in print. To tackle this challenge, Ameriprise needed to understand and address this tendency, build awareness among clients and their advisors and most importantly, make it easy to enroll.
Solution
Recast e-access as a one-click solution with clear benefits.
Through behavioral research and an in-depth discovery process, Carpenter Group uncovered underlying causes of customer resistance to e-delivery and developed a strategy designed to increase adoption rates.
First, we advised Ameriprise to re-engineer the registration process to make it easier to complete. Then we proposed a significant shift in enrollment strategy: rather than requiring clients to enroll on an ongoing basis as new documents became available for e-delivery, we recommended offering a universal opt-in to e-delivery that met SEC requirements. We also recommended an awareness campaign aimed at advisors and clients that featured a segmented messaging strategy conveying the convenience of less paper, as well as the advantages of managing finances online. The campaign involved advisors directly in the e-engagement process, recognizing them as key motivators in moving their clients to e-delivery. In just 6 weeks, over 100,000 investors went paperless and the e-delivery option was elected for more than 400,000+ shareholder documents.
