Banks and financial organizations are looking to transform the customer experience by creating a seamless digital journey. Here’s what you can do to get the show on the road.
Today’s consumers demand personalized digital banking experiences, custom made for them and their financial journey. However, personalization in banking differs from other industries. A bank’s success is rooted in trust and robust customer relationships, making them uniquely poised with rich sources of customer data, behavior, and experiences as well as transactional data and spends. The data from customer interactions like chats, voice calls, surveys and online banking can be used to understand behavior and craft offerings suited for different personas and customer profiles. Not only do these targeted products and offers deliver a digital experience, but they can also meet the rising demand for personalized products and services.
The consumer is king
Retail banking customers are demanding easier and faster access to their entire financial portfolio. It isn’t enough to know their account balance; they need the right financial offers — like student loans, home loans, credit cards, personal loans, overdraft protection and more — at the right time. Banks can reap the benefits by simply ensuring they pitch the right financial product at the right time.
These offerings must be accompanied by digital services that deliver all their information at their fingertips. This knowledge, transparency and empowerment encourages individuals to be financially responsible and allows them to take charge of their investment portfolios through informed decision making. Failure to meet these demands may urge them to switch to competitors without a second thought.
AI for detail: Three steps to delivering a personalized digital banking experience
Here are three steps to offering personalized banking offerings with a fresh perspective. Follow these to change your game and ace your business strategy:
Step 1: Collect all your data on one platform.
Most banks still maintain various disparate systems for their customer information such as data warehouses, cloud storage platforms and data lakes. The first step is to centralize this data on a single platform in a structured manner. Unstructured data isn’t very useful in its current state, but structured data can be sliced and diced, analyzed and pored over in detail, and used effectively for actionable insights.
Step 2: Invest in a customer analysis AI tool
The right tool can comb your data, deliver spectacular trends and insights in profiling, and match the right offerings to your customer. It must be transparent and secure, embedded in the bank’s environment, connected not just to your data but to your marketing tools as well. With the exponential growth in data volumes, AI becomes both an opportunity and a necessity. Most importantly, it can provide a 360-degree view of your potential and existing customer base.
Remember that AI tools are there to empower your data science teams, not replace them. AI tools enable data and conclusions to be easily accessible, flexible, and usable. These insights can help increase new customer conversions and retain existing customers by showcasing offerings that may be a perfect fit for the next step of their financial journey.
Additionally, a white box data model can ensure you maintain ownership and accountability for your data and the decisions based on them. White box (interpretable) models are those which can be easily explained in terms of behavior, parameters, variables and predictions. They can streamline compliance and support you during legal audits.
However, a word of caution: ensure your data handling is aligned and compliant with all regulations, and that your vendors and partners are aware of this requirement. Additionally, avoid vendor lock-in, so you can retain ownership of your data and leverage the software and services available to optimize the return on your investments.
Step 3: Enable data and AI use-cases
Below, we have outlined a few ways that data and AI-driven insights can translate into effective use cases designed to generate a specific business outcome. Of course, there are myriad possibilities depending on your specific business, but these are among the most typical and straightforward to implement.
Focus on personalized journey-based campaigns.
You can collect a great deal of information about your customers, their behavior, and how to communicate with them, just by analyzing the data you have about them. From our experience, a personalized campaign can grow engagement by 37% and conversion rate by 45% for the clients we have worked with.
Enrich your fraud and risk detection processes with data insights.
The right tool will help you understand and flag potential risk factors such as time spent filling an online form, missed loan payments, overstressed credit limits, multiple credit cards and other digital behavior. Additionally, security starts at home, so it’s critical to your business to stay ahead of digital vigilantes and hackers with regular security checks and software updates to protect your systems and your businesses.
Reduce your churn rate with proactive renewals.
An accelerated churn rate jeopardizes the success of your marketing efforts and customer services. With big data and AI, you can perform a fine-grained analysis of service calls and chats to identify dissatisfied or disengaged customer, then personalize your offerings to prevent them from opting out. You can perform predictive analysis of trends or customer requirements to better understand your customers and approach them with what they are looking for.
Now that you have a roadmap on how to offer a more personalized digital banking experience, the next step is to select the right technology partner to accelerate your journey, transform your systems faster and ensure you stay on track to achieving your business goals.
A 360-degree view of customer personas and preferences
Customer-oriented offerings and products are the future of banking. Embrace the opportunity to offer frictionless, personalized digital banking experiences to your customers with a technology partner that can help you mine the rich insights available in your customer data pool. After all, smart use of data and technology are the key to succeeding in the digital age.
