Community Banking and the Amazon Effect

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, March 28th, 2018 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI Online at poweredbywsi.com. My good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday co-founder, co-host, and all-around great guy, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, is unable to join us today. So we will regrettably proceed along without his involvement. But those of you that are interested in learning more about Jeff, he is in the process of rebranding his company from Community Bank Consulting to CBCI. And I believe his website shift is still underway, but you can always send us an email here at Free Webinar Wednesdays and it gets to both Jeff and myself. And if you are in the banking space, or even now that he's branched outside of banking, you can reach out and chat with him as well. For today's session, we're probably not going to go the full hour. I'm going to do an abbreviated version of a presentation that I did recently at a conference I was at. And you'll see that it says community banking and the Amazon effect. I don't want you to freak out if you're not a community banker, because I think what Amazon is doing is shifting consumer expectations regardless of whether you're in banking or healthcare or manufacturing or retail. And I heard somebody say at a conference I was at, Quoted, your last experience sets the expectation for your next experience. And whether you have gone online and purchased something from Amazon, you're a Prime member, you get in an Uber, when that experience takes place and it, it works better than what it had in the past, you as a consumer and your customers are carrying that across into their next expected transaction with you or your competitors. And even though you might be in a totally different industry than what Amazon or Uber from transportation or Ritz-Carlton from hospitality and lodging, when somebody experiences something that knocks it out of the park, that pressure is applied to you and your organization to be able to meet or exceed that expectation when consumers interact with you. So while I'm going to talk about community banking in today's discussion, I want you to replace whatever industry you're in with community, you know, take community banking and replace it with whatever industry you're in. That makes more sense. So that when you, when we take a look at the 5 areas where I believe Amazon is making a dent and how I relate it back into community banking, think about how that impacts your own organization. So with that being said, housekeeping items. If you have a question, comment, or just want to say hello, feel free to use the chat function in your GoToWebinar control panel, which is likely floating on the left— or actually the right-hand side of your computer screen— and let me know. It's one of the joys of doing a live show is we get to interact with the audience. And have a little dialogue back and forth. And today's show, as well as all other shows here at Free Webinar Wednesdays, are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So you can always check the show out if you would like to relive the experience or share it with a friend or coworker or colleague. You can certainly do that as soon as the video is ready to go. With that, Let's go ahead and dive in. So we're gonna talk about community banking and the Amazon effect. But before we jump into that, while Amazon certainly was the focus of the presentation that you're going to be listening to today, I start with this GAFA acronym, because these are 4 organizations that are setting the expectation for consumers. And if you've not heard of GAFA before, or you've heard it referenced, you're not exactly sure what it means. Really, the companies that we interact with that are having a huge part in our lives are certainly Google, Apple, Facebook, although they've been in the news recently for maybe not such a good reason, but certainly Facebook, it's hard to deny, is a part of our lives whether we like it or not. And then of course Amazon. And while all of them have some sort of a touch into the banking sector, they also likely touch your industry as well. Google controls search, your customers are using Apple devices with the ability to interact with different apps and mobility, they're researching you and getting information about you and your organization and your customers through Facebook and other social networking platforms, and then of course, you know, I've yet to have been at a conference or in a group of people where, you know, any less than 70 to 80% of the people in the room aren't Prime members, or everybody has bought something off of Amazon at one point in time. And, you know, books, movies, music, photos, you know, they're even getting into banking, which is obviously why this was a topic of conversation for me and the conference that I was at. But the GAFA organization, if you want to call it, certainly is one that's impacting businesses a lot of different ways. When I sat back and said, well, what are the 5 things that are going on over at Amazon and why should community bankers or businesses in this case in general be concerned, or maybe some lessons that people can learn from what's going on with Amazon, these are the 5 things that I came up with. Certainly Amazon is not afraid of being an innovative company. They continue to push the envelope, and we'll talk about some of the ways they have have been innovative in what you might want to do in order to try to at least— you're not going to keep up with Amazon, but at least making sure that you are building in innovation as part of your own business culture. They've certainly created an ecosystem where they try to wrap their hands around the entire customer when they come into that, which has then led to the customer experience that you get when you interact with them and how comfortable it is and how easy it is to do business. And repeat business. They are no strangers to the power of data and using that intelligence to make things better for their customers. So we've all been remarketed to when we go to Amazon and look at products and then travel around the internet and those products follow us. They understand what we've looked at and they're making predictive recommendations to help us find other stuff that we just simply can't live without. And so we'll talk about their use of data. And then lastly, they are very comfortable in building partnerships for their long-term success. And it looks like I've got a little typo in there. I don't know what NG stands for. But their long-term success and making sure that even though they may not necessarily be the ones that are doing it, although what oftentimes happens is they build a partnership, they work with a service, and then they end up buying it. You may not be in a position to do that, but are there other companies out there, maybe even customers of yours, that you can partner with in order to help increase the overall experience for your customer? Innovation is a term that maybe scares those that are coming out of the banking space, because banking tends to be very conservative, it tends to be very old school, it tends to have You know, the nuances of, you know, we don't want to be innovative, we want to be stable and sound. Our customers are expecting us to remain easy to do business with. They expect the same thing. So the perception of innovation maybe is a little scary to some folks because it involves change and learning, and depending on the industry that you're coming from, being innovative may not necessarily necessarily be part of your culture, but we can't be afraid of it because if we're not innovating and moving forward, the problem is everybody else likely is, and that essentially makes us moving backwards. And if we think about, you know, well, who had the real advantage here? If we think from a bookstore perspective, which is really how Amazon started, we look at Barnes Noble back to the 1800s, is their history can be dated back as far as 1873. Certainly the modern founding date is much, much recent, more recent although still 1965, you know, becoming the world's largest bookstore. And they maintained that designation for quite some time. And then along came the '90s and the dot-coms and this guy by the name of Jeff Bezos in Seattle in his garage, of course, because if you want to start something cool, apparently you have to do it in your garage first. So that should be part of your strategic planning efforts if you want to be innovative. Don't have those meetings at the office or in your boardroom. Go to somebody's garage, back the car out, set up some card table and chairs, and have your dialogue in a garage. That'll apparently increase the likelihood of success. I'm saying this tongue-in-cheek, of course. But they came out in 1994, and their goal was to become the Earth's biggest bookstore. And we all know what has happened to Barnes Noble. Certainly Borders Books couldn't even keep up. There's room for maybe 2 in this space. Barnes Noble still has the luxury of being able to walk into a store. And there's a Barnes Noble in the mall, and, you know, it's probably one of the last real populated, visited stores in the mall. It seems like every other store has gone out. But it's got Starbucks. There's an experience there where you can walk in, you can touch the books and read them. So it still has a little bit of a niche with it, but a vast majority of people now, when they buy their books, especially when you look at the electronic delivery and the popularity of Kindle devices, they're just going right to Amazon. And, you know, they've driven a number of stores out. We've seen what's happened to Toys R Us. We've seen what's happened to Blockbuster Video, and those are all examples of other organizations that didn't embrace the whole concept of being innovative. And, you know, to the extent that nobody's ever going to want to use a service like Netflix to have DVDs mailed to them, and nobody's going to want to wait a day to get a movie, that was just a precursor to technology catching up to allowing that movie to be delivered through the air and the internet, so you have instantaneous gratification. And with the exception of a handful of stores, maybe in Alaska, I don't think there's really a whole lot of Blockbuster Video stores around any longer, and Netflix, you know, killed that. So thinking about what happened here is a good example, and, you know, is your business, is your industry in one of these where there's a shakeup and there's a new entrant that's doing things differently that you don't think is really going to have an impact. When Apple came out with the iPhone and introduced Siri as a voice navigation voice assistant, I don't think anybody really saw the potential of having in-home voice or even video displays. Certainly, we were all watching The Jetsons growing up and seeing the video calling capability, but that exists today, and those are all things that While certainly the Amazon phone didn't go where they thought it was going to go, they've moved into our home. Google has the same devices now that can be intelligent assistants that live with us. And so being able to change the way people interact with how you're using a service. So, so they certainly saw that, you know, hey, there seems to be a lot to this. voice navigation capabilities, and now figure out a way we can do that. Then they introduced the person, or the assistant whose name starts with an A, that we like to joke about not mentioning during calls because some of you have some of these devices in your home or your office. But a variety of different sizes and different things in the ecosystem that they've created. One of the examples that I did real-time while I was there is I went in, I downloaded the skill, which is what the apps are called for the Echo ecosystem, is I went through and found First Assistant. They've got a home buying assistant. The frustration and the challenge, I think, for community bankers was when I did a search in that skill ecosystem for the word bank, 40 results came up, but only 7 of those actually were financial institutions, and most of them were the large ones. So because that was a conference that was really focused on the small community bank, I That tended to not be good news to the ears of those that were in the room. But when you look at a credit union, which banks consider obviously a competitor, 20 results came back and 18 of those were actually credit unions, and some of those were even small ones. And so you think about a credit union maybe being a little bit more adept in embracing innovation, being more risk tolerant, being able to move forward. and getting the bank's conservative nature of being able to move forward. But this is a great example, and you can actually, if you've got one of these Echo devices or Alexa devices, you can actually get in and download the skill and then just simply say, you know, ask First Citizens what's required to get a mortgage loan. And when you do that, you don't have to be a customer, you don't have to log in with a username and password, it's simply providing information back to you and it'll tell you what you need to do to get a home loan. And then when you're done, you just say stop. It'll say, thank you for using our app. If you're ready to get started, and it provides you with the phone number to the bank, it provides you with their website address, and just closes with, we're excited to help you in the next step of your process. So voice navigation and being able to interact— think about your business, and is there a way, or should you be thinking about, or are your competitors out there developing skills that cannot necessarily sell products or services, but how can you use these devices as educational tools to help people better understand the type of service that you offer, but not from a sales perspective, more so from an education and an informational perspective. Something to think about. The next item on the list was the ecosystem and really kind of looking at all all of the customers' needs that you have. And some of those may be ones that you can provide services for. Some of those might be ones that you have to think about the partnership, which is one of the other 5 elements. But we look at the Amazon ecosystem of what they've done. Certainly you've got all the membership-based services. So you've got Prime, you've got Video, you've got Kindle, which can provide you either on a book-by-book basis, you can subscribe to the All Access, you can use Audible, which is a service that they acquired. And for $15 a month, you can get an audiobook, stream it to your phone, listen to it while you're taking the dog for a walk or working out or getting ready for the workday in the morning. They've got other systems that they've also developed that will also wrap their hands around the entire customer experience. So businesses that have web properties and data storage are using the Amazon Web Services as hosting facilities. Prime Air. A lot of people think of delivery as being the Amazon drone, but they actually went out and purchased a bunch of 767 jets and Prime Air, so they're not as dependent on some of the other traditional carriers like the FedExes and the UPSs, where if it's a critical item, they're going to put it on an Amazon airplane and they're going to mail it and it's going to go through Amazon Prime Air. They recently purchased Ring Central, which is an electronic doorbell where you can tie that into the internet. They're now incorporating that with their Amazon Key service, which is allowing people to be able to see when the delivery person shows up with your package and you are at work. Amazon Key will allow for that delivery person to ping you on your phone, and you can authorize that delivery person to place the package inside of your home or inside your garage and remotely view that person through the doorbell or the video service. And unlock on a case-by-case basis and allow that person to get the package inside of your home. There's other things that the ecosystem has done even beyond, you know, selling products and services and delivering packages. One of the things that's most notable is they formed a partnership with Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, and they're in the process of trying to figure out how they can reinvent healthcare insurance. And fight the rising costs of healthcare, but certainly a lot of other things that they have done as part of this ecosystem to try to get people to use them, not just to buy a book, which is what they started as, and which is where really kind of Barnes Noble stayed, is how can we get into all these other areas that will help us capture the entire ecosystem of the customer. And what they've been able to do is, is, you know, attract a higher dollar value customer. So households that are earning at least $50,000 a year, you can see the percentage of those that are Prime members versus the ones that are beneath that. You've still got a pretty good penetration of the society being there, but certainly it's a higher dollar customer, a higher earning potential customer that is a Prime membership. So those obviously translate into more profitable relationships. When asked questions about, you know, your trust and your utilization, one of the things that this financial reality survey came back was, at least as it relates to the banking industry, is there's 5 million millennials, which are the, you know, 30 and under crowd, that don't have checking accounts. They are using services maybe like Venmo or PayPal, and they're not using a checking account in a traditional sense. Some of them even have said that a payroll card, which basically provides the employer the ability to put money on a stored value card, and the employee then has the ability to access that money on a piece of plastic, but it's really not sitting in a bank, it's not earning them interest. not doing any financial benefit to them. They feel that that's a good opportunity or a good service because they see it as very convenient, not thinking about the big reasons why you should have a bank account. And when asked why they don't have bank accounts, almost half of them said, well, because we don't trust banks. It's just more convenient to not have an account and we can figure out a way to do it somewhere else. So think about that as a shopping shocking statistic. So when we thought about how you build an ecosystem to take care of your banking customers, and this might even work for you within your business, is first and foremost, get them while they're young and attract them in either through education and training. If you're an organization or in an industry where you don't really, you know, bank a family relationship, but thinking about when somebody is buying a business and they're getting into an industry that you also serve, How can you produce content or provide information to help them be a successful business owner so that they'll ultimately feel favorable towards you as someone that helped them along that journey of becoming a successful business, and then they want you to be their partner or their service provider? The importance from a millennial perspective on the ability to offer your services digitally. So as a business that relies on your website, it relies on your online transaction capability, it relies on the user experience, it relies on your ability to deliver that information through a mobile-friendly format, because the mobile device certainly is becoming the preferred means of accessing the internet and accessing data and info. And then understand what that journey looks like. Like. So when— if you're selling to small businesses, the business is going to start off, they might need attention in a particular area that as they grow over the years might not need some of those services from a startup perspective, but down the road evolving along with them and making sure that they know that you can provide that service, you know, soup to nuts, basically start to finish. Think about how easy you are to do business with. And this is where I mentioned, you know, Uber, for example. One of the things that I love about Uber and Lyft and some of the ridesharing services is the word that comes to mind when I think of those platforms is frictionless. I push my app, I tell it where I'm at, I tell it where I want to go, a car shows up, I get in the car, it's usually clean, It's usually got a nice person driving because he knows or she knows that I can rank them, and if they're rude, they can, you know, get kicked out of the network or worse. But I also know that they can rank me, so I have to behave myself. So the experience has got some social pressure to treat each other nicely, which is what you should be doing anyway. When I get to my destination, I simply get out of the vehicle and The app does its thing, transaction is processed, and there's really nothing more that I need to do. Compare that to taxi where, you know, maybe the car's not clean, maybe the person wants cash instead of a credit card, maybe the credit card reader doesn't work. There's just all sorts of things that enter into the equation. And once you do an Uber or a Lyft or other sort of a ridesharing service, It's really difficult for you to go back unless there's really no other option. And that's really the only time that I'll ever do a taxi is if, if those services aren't available, then I'll go with a taxi. That's the type of experience that people have. And while a bank or a manufacturing company or a retailer isn't doing what Uber or Lyft or any of those services are doing, you have to think people want to have that type of an experience because they enjoy it. One of the things that Amazon has done with their Amazon Go services, you can now— they've got a store in Seattle, and maybe you've read about this. If you go online, you can find a video. I won't play it through the webinar because videos over webinars typically don't work so well. But you can actually see a video of this. This gentleman walks in, he pulls up the Amazon Go app on his phone, he scans it much like walking through a turnstile on a subway or public transit. And then by walking around the store, cameras, proximity sensors, other sorts of monitoring devices pay attention to him, and they pay attention to what he's buying, what he puts in his bag. And then when he walks out, he just walks out, and the system knows what he has grabbed, what he's put in his bag, and it automatically charges his card. So there are no checkout people. All the human element that is involved with these stores There's in the backend with regards to stacking and making sure that the products are continually replenished and maintaining the inventory, but there are no checkout people. There's people walking around that can help answer questions, but you don't have to wait in line. And even the self-checkouts that some of the grocery stores are offering today can't compete with this because you basically walk in, walk out. Think about that as an experience and how easy that is. I just need to grab a sandwich, maybe a Red Bull and a bag of chips. I get in, I grab it, I walk out, and that whole thing might take me, you know, 2 minutes, maybe 30 seconds, depending on where that stuff's located within the store and how long that would have taken me if it were busy and I would have to wait for, you know, a line to buy 3 things. Other examples that Amazon has introduced that you also need to be aware of if you're not One is smile.amazon.com, that screenshot there. If you go— and this is really tugging on the social consciousness and maybe even the heartstrings of consumers— if you go to smile.amazon.com, you have the ability to pick from a number of charitable organizations, and a portion of your transaction will be automatically carved out and donated at no additional cost to you. It's just something that Amazon is doing as an option. I have a good friend who lost their daughter to neuroblastoma and was very excited to see that the Children's Neuroblastoma Cancer Foundation recently was added as one of the SMILE charities. Now knowing that anytime I go on Amazon, a portion of my purchase is being carved out and being sent down to Pat, who's the founder of the CNCF just outside of Chicago, I now know that by shopping on Amazon, I'm supporting them. And just within the last couple of transactions, you know, almost $10 has gone directly to the CNCF as a result of my online purchasing. And if I do that and you do that and your friends do that, think about how that makes you feel about shopping on Amazon and the likelihood that you're going to make an extra effort to go there because you know you're doing good. Is there a way that you can tie doing business with you as a business to doing good? So it's beyond just products and services that you're offering and maybe competitive rates, but now you've tied an extra layer, and the millennial generation certainly is very interested in doing good for others, and, and this has got a real powerful pull. Some of the other devices that they've implemented just to make the experience— you've got these little buttons and these wands, So you can, you can order a button for, you know, $5 or $6. It charges you that amount, but the first time you press the button and reorder Tide or press the button and get some more Keurig K-Cups, you're credited back that amount. So the buttons don't cost you anything. And you can place those in the laundry, in the kitchen, um, you know, cabinet where you keep your coffee. And when you grab You know, your last few Keurig K-Cups, you can just press the button and 2 days later your Prime membership orders and delivers a replenished coffee supply for you. Convenient, super easy, super simple. Understand that experience. So if you want to improve your experience as, as a business, think about how you can be responsive. Understand when somebody wants to do business with you. I recently participated in a mystery shop of banks and credit unions and mortgage brokers, and we made phone calls and sent emails, and 40% of those that we said we were interested in getting information or doing a mortgage loan never even made an attempt to give us a call back. Those calls, those emails, those applications that we started just fell into a black hole. So before we even think about any of this gee-whiz cool technology, think about, you know, just the human element. Do you call people back? How long does it take? We're all familiar with a company probably called Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans. When we mystery shopped them, within 1 minute of dropping out of the application and not completing the process, we had a phone call from somebody from Rocket Mortgage. Now, it was obvious that this individual was wasn't based in the United States, there was a heavy accent, they called 12 more times over the next 12 days. So maybe they need to dial that back a little bit, but the fact that they paid attention to when somebody started to do business and then decided not to is, is something that you might want to take a lesson from. Understand where the choke points are in your business. When somebody wants to do business with you, is it paperwork? Is it regulatory requirements? Is it your hours of operation? Is it the fact that they can't do what they want to do on your website? What are the things that stop people from doing business with you? And then fix them, because that's certainly what Amazon is doing. Look at your abandonment rates. When you go into Amazon and you put stuff in your shopping cart and then something happens and you step away from Amazon and you go do something else, or you leave your browser, Amazon will send you an email reminder to say, hey, you've Did you forget to check out? Was there something else that you needed? And a lot of times when somebody starts that process with you, if they forget, and it may not be intentional, but, you know, maybe their kid just bumped their head and they had to go to the emergency room, and by the time they got home, they totally forgot. You can remind that customer to come back and complete that transaction. But understand that sometimes it's the little things. It's the phone calls, it's the handwritten thank-you notes that don't really take a tremendous amount of technology, but can you focus on some little things that make that experience better for your customers? We gave one example of using a chatbot, for example, as a way to engage and interact. So don't feel like you've got to start doing everything right out of the gates, and very similar to what the bank example that I gave you, where you can just ask it some questions, just provide some basic information. So your hours of operation, some details about common questions that you have, and then think about, you know, hey, there may be a way for you to maybe tie in some basic customer information as part of that process, or be able to transition that chat request through your website over to a human person that can then take it to the next level. And then when you're finally ready, you can actually get running and you can give transactional capability. I've actually bought things through Facebook Messenger where I've seen something, the Messenger has come up, it's given me a product, it's given me a link, and then I've gone through, authorized the transaction, and then the chatbot keeps me updated. Hey, thanks for your purchase of the bike taillight that you just bought. We're getting ready to ship it. We'll let you know. And then when the product ships, I get the chatbot that comes up and it says, your product has shipped. Just want you to know it'll be there within the next 2 to 5 business days. And then when they get a confirmation of delivery, hey, we just want to let you know it looks like your, your bicycle taillight, which is the last thing that I purchased, your bicycle taillight has been delivered. For some reason you don't see it, let us know. And so even though I never really responded back to any of those chats, it was nice that this gave me that kind of, you know, feedback as to what was going on along the way, making my experience with that company a whole lot better. We have a ton of information about our customers in banking. Certainly we have more information than we even know what to do with sometimes. But even your own business, you might have prior purchase behavior, you might know a little bit more about the individuals that you're working with. You can leverage some of the data that you can pull out of sites like LinkedIn and other social networking platforms. So the better we understand what our customers are doing, the better we're positioned to be able to serve them on an ongoing basis. So Amazon certainly knows what we're doing, because when we visit the site, we're logged in. They know where we're visiting. They know what we've looked at. They know what we've ordered. If you've ever created a wish list, I have a technology wish list. I have a bicycling wish list. I have a dog supply wish list. So it knows that I like technology. It knows that I, you know, what I like to read. It knows that I love golden retrievers. And so when I log into Amazon, it makes predictive recommendations for me on those things. So there's all sorts of data that they're collecting, but you have access to some of that data as well. I mentioned the demographic info. If you're not a financial institution, obviously you don't have, you know, loan or maybe the permission to pull credit report info. But if you're extending credit to your customers, maybe they provided you with that authorization and you can get access to some of that data. You just need to be very careful when you're using data, use it very responsibly, because there's ways— and if we've seen with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, if you get access to data and you abuse it, that can certainly backfire on you very, very quickly. But the data that is there is certainly very valuable in personal personalizing. And so what a lot of organizations are doing, and this is what Amazon has done, is they take the entire customer experience that you get when you go to the website, and they've taken the interaction layer, which is really the website itself, and it's the buttons and the clicks and the images, and they've separated that from the data layer, which is all of the intelligence that it knows about you. Because if those two were the same system and they wanted to make a change to how they're analyzing the data, or they wanted to make a change to the look and feel of their website, each of those would have to work together in order for that to be implemented. And in a separated environment like this, as long as you've got that data connection between the two, you can change the user interface as much as you want and still leverage the data, or you can enhance your data and grab additional info and give it some more intelligence And as artificial intelligence and predictive modeling and all these other technologies continue to evolve, you can continue to then roll that data up into the interaction layer, which together overall really benefit the customer experience. So hopefully that makes sense along with the explanation of this little graphic here. And then lastly, Thinking about the partnerships that you have, because as a business, small business, medium business, even very large businesses, sometimes you can't do it all yourself. And so while you may not necessarily go out and establish a partnership with a bank such as Chase or say, hey, we're going to reinvent healthcare, and just pick up the phone and call Warren Buffett and get Berkshire Hathaway involved, There may be other organizations within your industry, within your community, the local Chamber of Commerce, economic development groups, maybe university where you could build some strategy with those folks. But recently Amazon made the big announcement that it's not going to start a bank, but it's going to partner with banks. And Chase is one of the ones that first was announced as a partner to be able to offer a checking account accounts to Amazon. So imagine, if you will, hey, as a Prime member, you get a free Prime membership. They'll save you $90 a year if you open up the Chase-branded Amazon checking account and get a Chase-branded Amazon debit card and have automatic payments being debited from, or get direct deposit for your payroll, whatever the case is. It's a very powerful combination for Amazon to be able to offer. And we saw You know, people are paying a good deal of money on an annual basis to belong to all these programs. Tying that in, building that community experience, is really one that they're trying to go after with this. The reality is, even though the checking account news hit the wire and got everybody all fired up, Amazon certainly is not a first-time player in this financial service. And I've mentioned the Berkshire Hathaway partnership with health insurance, but they've offered a Chase-branded rewards Visa card since 2002. They do a small business loan program with Synchronicity or Synchrony, and I know that because my mom actually had an account opened in her name that we had to call and cancel because, you know, there was a little bit of an identity theft issue there that we had to get fixed. They do a small business loan program, and then they even extend credit to some of the third-party sellers that are selling stuff directly into Amazon. You know, over $1 billion in loans that they've provided to people that have created products and want to sell into the Amazon system. Some other relatively shocking statistics to some of the bankers that were in the room that we're talking about the number of people according to this survey from LendEDU Is how many of you would be comfortable allowing Amazon to be able to handle your money and you would like the opportunity to use them as your primary bank? And that number even goes higher if they're a Prime member, over 50%. And almost 50% would say, you know, not only would I give them my checking account, but they can have my savings account too. Even Eric Coleman, who is one of the probably more popular social media speakers out there. His first book called Socialnomics, he's got a video that's on the YouTube that's very popular. His most recent 2018 Socialnomics video, at about 50 seconds in, says consumers will soon trust Amazon more than their bank. So even outside of the world of banking, consumers are starting to realize that Think about what that means and where that shift is impacting your business. Can people go buy your product and service on Amazon from a competitor? Do you need to put your product and service in Amazon as a partnership? Maybe Amazon needs to be one of your partners that allows you to reach an additional number of customers and realize you're not going to make the same profit margin as you would have sold it yourself. But can you make that up in quantity and gain exposure to a variety of new clients that you wouldn't otherwise have? So banks, businesses, what have you, can either freak out and say, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do? Or my friend Jill Castile, who's the CEO for a little bank down just outside of Oklahoma, city in Edmond, Oklahoma. She went ahead and actually was part of a tweet conversation with a friend of mine, Chris, and said, hey Amazon and Jeff, why don't you collaborate with a bank like Citizens? We'd love to partner. And you might find this shocking, but that is Jill's real cell phone number. She put it on Twitter for the whole world to see. And so a lot of people are kind of shocked that she would have done that. But it's the transparency, it's the openness. And so Chris commented back, you know, community banks are perfect incubators and innovators. And so you can see her response. So I think this is awesome. I don't believe she's received any sort of a phone call back from Mr. Bezos, and I don't know if she will, but certainly the attempt to be a partner is out there. And thinking in that kind of a mindset is one that we might need to think about. So some partnership opportunities, not just in banking but within your own world. So you may have customers, community members, the community itself. So there's a lot of ways that you might be able to build some partnerships. I talked about chatbots earlier. This might be one of the partnerships that you're gonna want to investigate sooner than later, but there's companies out there that you can partner with to build chatbot technology into your website. And when we think about just engagement rates with email, because that's typically how we're communicating with our customers now, you're usually happy with a 20% open rate, maybe 5% click-through rate to get people to come back. If you implement a chatbot like that Messenger experience that I had when I purchased that taillight, or some other way that you can get people to opt into a conversation with you, People are seeing open rates in those Messenger, you know, when the message comes up, you know, almost 90% of the time those being read because it's coming back to me, it's personal. What's this? Oh, okay, it's being shipped, it's being packaged, it's being delivered. And then if there are links included as part of their chat, you know, here for other lights that we have to offer for your bicycle, or click here to track your package directly on the USPS Postal Service, or click here to, you know, whatever the case is. Click-through rates not in the 5% range, but 50, even 60% in some cases. So getting people to really interact and learn more about you, and so a chatbot partnership with a company may be something that you would have to think about doing in order to build communication and that relationship between you and your customers. So to recap, these are just the 5 areas we talked about: ways to be innovative, thinking about building an ecosystem that really wraps its hands around your customers, and then delivering an exceptional customer experience. Understand the data that you have on your customers to be better stewards of that relationship. Predict what they want. If you know that your customer reorders about every 6 months, Give them the opportunities, send them a reminder so that just makes it easy for them. And then identifying what key partners you can use to help kind of rise the tide. So you may not be able to do it all, but if you bring a partner in, you might be able to do even more and share some of that success with a valid partner that's really, you know, involved and in it to help you become a much, much better organization. So that completes the bulk of the presentation. Again, this was a little bit more involved. I cut it down a little bit, but I just wanted to share some thoughts, and hopefully that gives you some inspiration of some different ways that you might be able to leverage what the folks at Amazon are doing, why consumers are paying attention, and what it might be able to maybe mean for your business in 2019. 2018 and beyond. Those of you that are live, if you got any thoughts, comments, questions after I have concluded now, if you've— did it strike a chord, give you any food for thought? I'd love to know. I will keep an eye and see whether or not there's anything, but if not, countdown. 3, 2, 1. So it doesn't look like there's any, any chat going on. So I'll go ahead and we'll conclude this week's episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thanks so much for those of you that have joined live. It's always a pleasure to have you here to keep me company, even though Jeff was absent today. It was nice to have those of you in the room with me as well. Hopefully these 5 areas have given you some food for thought and will inspire you to do something maybe a little different, take a a more introspective look at your business and your industry and maybe some of the ways that you might be able to change. And certainly, if there's an opportunity that I can help you here at WSI with any of those shifts or evolutions within your organization, please, please feel free to reach out and let me know. It'd be certainly an honor to work with you and help out, even if you just want to have have a quick chat, feel free to reach out and let me know. With that, we'll go ahead and we'll wrap the show for today. Thanks again for joining us. We'll see you next time at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Recording will be made available shortly, and when it's up, you can go ahead and share it with folks. And until then, we'll look forward to seeing you online. Thanks everybody. Bye-bye.