New Banks Are Coming after You
You can usually tell when a bank is having trouble relating to customers and prospects. The very look of the website says, “Web 1.0, circa 1992.” Generic tables, limited self-service options, random product offerings that have nothing to do with the user’s visit. And oh, yes. If you have a problem, contact the call center and wait on hold for the next available operator.
These are all great ways to lose customers to the competition, where the experience may be more fluid, personal and intuitive.
If you really want to be a player in today’s digital economy, you must offer a personalized banking customer experience (CX). One that engages customers in a one-on-one, friendly and familiar fashion. One that recognizes each visitor by name and picks up the contact where it left off, with some relevant, helpful suggestions thrown in to enrich and reward time spent.
The Difference between Personalization and Customization
To be clear, personalization is not the same as customization, which has more to do with arranging bank accounts and portfolios for convenient ease-of-use. Personalization goes deeper. It envelopes customization, leveraging research and data to create a durable point of difference for your bank. It allows the user to modify elements of their own banking page to suit the way they want to do business with you, and intelligently considers their history with you, using behind-the-scenes automation to recognize needs and proactively offer solutions that fit the user’s point-of-view. Ideally, it embeds the user into your system and into your brand.
Simple things, such as a personal salutation, can be captured during onboarding and offered the next time the customer visits the site. Indeed, onboarding provides the perfect venue for gathering information. You may already possess such personal details as marital status, number of dependent children, homeownership/renter status, age, vacation plans, vehicle make and year, language preferences and other information, all of which can help you categorize customers into service classes that make personalizing your banking CX easier. This data can then be used to provide cross-selling suggestions, such as car loans or education savings accounts, at the exact right times.
To establish a well-designed, personalized banking experience, you will need two basic building blocks: the right technology stack and upfront research.
Personalization allows the user to modify elements of their own banking page to suit the way they want to do business. It allows for intelligent consideration of their history with you, to recognize needs and proactively offer solutions that fit the user’s point-of-view. Ideally, it embeds the user into your system and into your brand.
Digital Technology for a Digital World
One of the reasons many banks continue to lag in personalization is an aging technology stack. As artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and other leading-edge technologies enable personalized interactions across industries, banks must sunset legacy systems to accommodate multi-channel, digital customer communications.
Currently, there is middleware available that can help you bridge the gap between old technology and new, but it only forestalls the inevitable. By working with an experienced CX partner such as Concentrix Catalyst, you can explore your technology needs together and develop a sensible legacy-tech retirement path to suit an economical and efficient transition into the digital realm.
Dial in with Research
Research is the other prime driver needed to develop a high-quality, endearing, personalized banking CX. And again, partners like Concentrix Catalyst can help you acquire it.
The research required to design a personalized customer journey begins with the quantitative data you likely already have in your system. We already talked about some of the details, such as age, marital status, homeownership, etc. that can be used to build customer categories around common variables. These categories can help define the experience models you will use in designing your various customer journeys and interlacing them with bank products and service strategies that make sense for each group.
With categories defined, you will next want to conduct qualitative research, to fine-tune your personalization models for an even “stickier” CX. This is where behavioral science comes in, overlaying psychological factors, such as “concern about overspending,” or “discouraged by bad credit” into the equation. By personally interviewing just six-to-eight subjects per category as part of your research, you can further nuance your CX models to elevate and accelerate results.
For instance, customers who have trouble managing their money will likely appreciate automated spending alerts or budgeting tools programmed into their experience. “Investment tips” might appeal to another segment of your customer pool, much as “debt consolidation” offers might do the same.