The Case For Persistence

Recently, life for my wife and I has been a touch over the “crazy” line. In the past three months, we prepared our house for market, sold that house in nine days, hurried up and bought a new house, packed up our belongings, closed on our old house, moved in with my parents for three weeks, closed on our new home and moved into the new house.

So when my new credit card – featuring EMV chip technology – arrived from my bank, it was the least of my worries. With belongings scattered all over the place, the new card and activation instructions went in the “to do later” pile. After all, my existing credit card still worked just fine.

However, that didn’t stop my bank from trying to spur me into action and activate my new card.

The first step was to send me a kindly worded email about 5 business days after receipt of my new card, encouraging me to activate my new credit card. The email not only encouraged activation but also appealed to the benefits and enhanced security that EMV chip technology provides.

After having no luck to prompt me to activate my new credit card, the bank pushed a bit harder.

The second step was to give me a call with an automated message, encouraging me to activate my card to ensure better credit card security with chip technology.

At this point, the bank has my attention.

This is one of the most in-depth campaigns I’ve seen from a financial institution to push a customer to activate a new credit card. They have successfully moved card activation up on the list from “to do later” to “I should really get on that.” Bravo!

To say that persistence has paid off in this scenario is an understatement. I would be interested to see the lift in activation ratios before and after implementation of these practices. What’s more, having been on the sending end of campaigns to encourage card use after activation, I now want to see how persistent a bank has to be in order to see a lift in use.

Now, please excuse me. I have to go find the pile I placed my new credit card in among all of our unpacked boxes.

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