What are your MCIF’s most useful reports?   What kinds of research can you do with your MCIF?  What is the most useful information your MCIF can supply to your sales force?

In our last column we discussed what kinds of data that are useful to your MCIF and why it’s important to define your data.  Now that we have a good foundation on which to build, let’s talk about how you can best utilize your data to increase your sales.

What are your MCIF’s most useful reports?

Think of your reports as a tactical means to accomplish your overall marketing strategy.  There are four reports that are particularly helpful for your sales efforts.

§         Service Mix Report – This lists the most popular combinations of services, categories or Ptypes (services) purchased by your customers.  The most popular service sold to your customers is probably your single-service (and typically unprofitable) checking service.  However, you can also use this report to examine your profitable combinations of services.  For instance, your [checking – home equity line of credit] combination should generate a healthy amount of profit each year. 

§         Cross-Sell Matrix (Cross-tabs) Report – This is a two-dimensional matrix that is composed of services in a horizontal row intersecting services in vertical columns.  The intersection of two services (e.g., Checking and Savings) will show the percent of Checking households that have a Savings account.  This is very useful for selling additional profitable services.

§         Product Summary Report – This report is grouped according to your product hierarchy and it illustrates the number of accounts, the numbers of households, loan and deposit balances of your product, as well as other components like weighted average rate and maturity, net interest income, fees, costs and profit.  You can identify your most profitable products and then find out which customers are using those products.

§         Decile Reports – These reports show the number of households and total loans, deposits and profit per decile (10 equal household portions).  This proves the 80/20 rule:  that 80% of your bank’s loans or deposits come from only 20% of your customers.  In addition, you might see that as few as 35% of your customers are providing all of your profit!

What kinds of research can you do with your MCIF?

You can perform very specific queries on your customers’ data, particularly if you have demographic data that has been added into the database.  For instance, if you discovered from your Household Service Mix Report that your [checking – home equity line of credit] combination was profitable, you could perform the following research:

1.      Find all of the single-service checking customers that do not currently have a home equity line or loan with you.

2.      Of those customers, find out which ones own their home.

3.      Of those customers, find out which ones have lived in their home for more than some number of years.

4.      Of those customers, find out which ones have a home value of greater than some dollar amount.

5.      And, you could keep adding on more and more filters such as marital status, presence of children, etc. to find the best prospects.

What is the most useful information your MCIF can supply to your sales force?

Your sales force wants to see customer data in an easy-to-use format.  For instance, you could provide a report to them that contains your customers’:

§         Name

§         Account Number

§         Address

§         Phone Number

Then, you could use this format to provide them with reports on:

§         Your bank’s top 10% most profitable customers

§         Your single service checking customers that would qualify for a home equity line of credit

§         Your car loan customers who have had a car loan for two years and may be looking at purchasing a new car

  There’s more to come!  In our next column, we’ll talk about how to use your MCIF to increase your profits.

John J. Coffey, C.P.A. and Gene Palm are the principals of Profit Resources, a consulting company that specializes in MCIF technologies.  www.profitres.com. (c) Profit Resouces 2006