KYC Is Dead

Deepa Bachu of Intuit has a fabulous post on designing awesome products. (no, don’t skip. Click the link, read the article and come back here. I’ll wait)

I think time has come for product managers (and designers) to stop using the term Know Your Customer. Before you reach for your cudgels to beat me up – my intent is not to stop people from knowing their customers but to get a couple of layers deeper in the engagement. Let’s look at some specific problems with this “know your customer”phrase

1. The phrase has been bastardized. It happened the moment KYC as a TLA emerged from the fertile crescent of product management and got dragged – kicking and screaming – into the muddy waters of banking. In its most sophisticated form in that industry, KYC is a bunch of entity identifiers and descriptive text about the entity. To be updated at intervals and filed away only to be brandished if a regulator came calling
2. The word “customer” – I have a problem with. It is very common in my industry of enterprise information and I am sure it happens elsewhere too – the customer is not the user. The customer is the one who disintermediates vendors from the user (example, IT departments strike deals with capital market data vendors and often chooses the most cost effective vendor. The market data users are dealing room staff who do not participate in the choosing process). If it is the user that we care about then we must not confuse her with the customer
3. The word “know” – I have a problem with that too. I know too many people on Facebook – I care for only a fraction of them. I know many more people on LinkedIn than I could really care for. The word “know” has diluted the sense of affinity in relationships. In its pristine form, Know Your Customer is not really “know” – it is living with him, sharing his daily joys, pains and frustrations. A closeness much deeper than just that cursory “know”

So what should the new phrase be? How about User Affinity (UA). Besides addressing some of the problems I mentioned above, this is a smaller acronym and easily segues into what should be a logical next step – User Experience (UX). UX should build out what UA discovers – that is the relationship

I’ll leave this post here just so you can let me know your thoughts about this new paradigm of User Affinity. In the next post of this series I will look at ways to develop affinity and insights. Till then keep the comments coming