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• Case | HBS Case Collection | October 2018 (Revised February 2019)

  Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation

  Ryan W. Buell and Leslie K. John

  In August 2017, Commonwealth Bank of Australia was looking for ways to differentiate itself from competing banks, and was also trying to improve the financial wellbeing of its customers. One domain where this was particularly relevant was in its bank-issued credit card business, where customers routinely selected cards that although profitable for the bank could be a poor fit for customers’ needs – leading to low satisfaction scores, cancellations, and occasionally, financial distress. To that end, the company’s Behavioral Economics team had developed a provocative experiment dubbed “The Good and the Bad.” Rather than just presenting the strengths of its various credit card offerings, they proposed also promoting each credit card’s less-obvious drawbacks. Being transparent with customers might help them make better choices, but would those choices come at the expense of bank performance? Should a company choose to be in the sales prevention business?

  Keywords: transparency; Banks and Banking; Credit Cards; Customer Focus and Relationships; Competitive Strategy;

  Citation:

  Buell, Ryan W., and Leslie K. John. "Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Unbanklike Experimentation." Harvard Business School Case 619-018, October 2018. (Revised February 2019.)  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

  Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact

  Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell

  It is a well-established result in social psychology that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. However, increasingly companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial services, health care, and education) are deploying self-service technologies (SSTs), through which anxious customers transact without human contact. The impact of customer anxiety on service relationships is neither well understood, nor consistently factored into service design. In this paper, two laboratory experiments and one field experiment, conducted in financial service contexts, document the negative effects of anxiety on customer choice satisfaction, firm trust, and long-term engagement and explore the impact of giving self-service consumers the option to interact with a person. Participants engaged in an online investing simulation who are made to feel anxious due to market downturns are less satisfied with their choices and report lower levels of trust in the firm. Providing participants with the opportunity to interact with an expert, or even another participant, dampens anxiety’s negative effects on choice satisfaction and, by extension, firm trust. Interestingly, we find that very few participants who are offered the option to interact with a person take advantage of the opportunity, which is consistent with the idea that it is the mere availability of human contact that mitigates anxiety’s deleterious effects. Finally, in a field experiment conducted with a credit union’s self-service term loan approval process, the incorporation of access to human contact increased customer loan acceptance by 16%, suggesting that access to human contact can improve long-term service engagement.

  Keywords: Anxiety;

  Citation:

  Shell, Michelle A., and Ryan W. Buell. "Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-089, February 2019.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

  Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices

  Ryan W. Buell, Shwetha Mariadassou and Yanchong Zheng

  We study how transparency into the levels and changes of relative sustainability performance affects consumer choices. Our work considers two forms of transparency: process transparency, in which customers receive information about the company's sustainability performance relative to other companies, and customer transparency, in which customers receive information about their own sustainability performance relative to other customers. Through three studies with 7,308 participants, we observe that revealing the levels of relative performance is more motivating for customers in the process transparency domain, whereas revealing relative changes in performance is more motivating for customers in the customer transparency domain. We employ structural equation modeling to identify the underlying mechanisms for these results. We show that levels information is more reflective of objective performance comparison, thus strengthening motivation in the domain of process transparency. In contrast, changes information helps to mitigate self-serving attribution biases in the customer transparency domain, thus playing a more significant role in affecting motivation.

  Keywords: relative performance tranparency; process transparency; customer transparency; levels; changes; reflectiveness; self-serving attribution biases; sustainability; consumer choice;

  Citation:

  Buell, Ryan W., Shwetha Mariadassou, and Yanchong Zheng. "Relative Performance Transparency: Effects on Sustainable Choices." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-079, January 2019.  View Details

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