Just finished reading a great article on big data and segmentation. While segmentation is great, I'd like to suggest that every customer should be treated as an individual and thus their banking experience should be personalized for that moment in time. By personalizing every interaction, banks can reduce cost of service, differentiate their brand and impact customer experience in a positive way.
Customers expect a seamless, individualized experience across all banking channels. They expect a Google or Amazon experience. They want to be able to trust their bank to help them before there's a problem. They want banking to be simple.
One of the greatest advantages banks and credit unions have over non-financial players is the vast amount of data they have on their users. But as we know, getting at all that data isn't always easy. The key is finding a solution that maps to existing data within an institution and augmenting it with industry and proprietary databases and crowd sourcing analytics to create a robust, personalized customer view that can predict the individual needs of each customer. It's about finding those moments of truth and capitalizing on them each and every time.
One trend in the digital banking space is the fact that high digital adoption rates are not being matched by utilization rates. Most users log into online or mobile banking simply to check their account balances or review transactions. They aren't taking advantage of the robust capabilities and services the digital channels provide. As a result, FIs aren't seeing as much of a cost savings as they were hoping. It's time to use the data that's out there to give customers a better experience. Financial institutions need to personalize every experience by bringing relevant features and services to the forefront to simplify the customer's journey.
Let me explain...
The situation today: a customer logs into a digital channel and they are presented with various buttons for accounts, balances and transactions. They can click on one of these buttons and see some basic information. After that, they aren't sure what to do, where to go or what to look for. They aren't being prompted to do anything, so they log out.
Now imagine that same customer logging in and seeing a personalized message alerting them to the fact that a bill is coming due. And let's take it one step further. Once the customer clicks on the message, they are presented with several personalized options to take care of the potential problem such as paying the bill and setting up automatic bill payment so the problem doesn't happen again.
Think of the experience the customer has just had: It's proactive, personalized and it solves the issue at hand. There is no need for the customer to call the bank or go into a branch. You've satisfied three objectives: reducing cost of service, building customer loyalty and promoting adoption of products/services. What could be simpler?