Superior Digital Experience Can Help Win The Battle For Customers

To win consumers’ long-term loyalty in the digital space, you need to offer them the very best possible seamless journey, says Adobe’s recent “Digital Enrolment” report.

Superior Digital Experience Can Help Win The Battle For Customers

There is a new battleground emerging in the financial services arena. It’s the battle to win the hearts and minds of customers in the digital space. No longer can a brand satisfy itself that they have a good online sales funnel. This new battle goes much deeper, and it’s one with end-to-end customer experience at its heart. It’s the battleground for long-term loyalty and relationships, and one that centres on being more customer-focused than ever.

At Aviva, we are focusing on building the very best, frictionless experience for our millions of customers through MyAviva, the place where all our products come together. This is a huge and vital focus for us in our digital business. I was, therefore, both encouraged and challenged to read more on this in Adobe’s recent “Digital Enrolment” report.

Account enrolment itself is a vital step in a brand securing a deeper customer relationship. The report underlines why this is so crucial, with active involvement—particularly with a financial services brand—being essential to drive higher retention, recommendation, and multi-product holding. At Aviva, our ongoing activity to register our customers and provide them with the very best service and product benefits through MyAviva is a key part of our strategy. It’s, therefore, an area I am really passionate about, and it’s great to see its importance acknowledged.

Money matters, and the decisions customers make in this space are often big and can be life-changing or life-shaping. The decisions sometimes appear complex and, at times, confusing to the customer, often involving comparison tables and a lorryload of jargon too. Issues of trust, privacy, and security add further to the complexity and challenge for the customer along the way.

The report underlines that the very survival of businesses is dependent on them delivering a seamless and customer-centric digital experience. Taking millennials as just one target group, many of them would love a challenger brand to enter the market, deliver a better experience and true disruption. Many of this same audience prefer a trip to the dentist to dealing with financial matters online today, which shows just how important an issue this is.

It’s, certainly, a common theme we work on at Aviva, as we build better and better digital experiences for our customers, many of whom have had a pension or investment product with us for a number of years. We are working to deliver experiences that make our customers feel like they are able to take control of their financial matters with confidence.

It is clear, though, that none of this is easy and it comes at a cost. Many startups have an advantage, with a blank sheet of paper and systems built from day one around the customer. Meanwhile, established firms have legacy systems, data in multiple places, a lack of consistency into mobile platforms, and a lack of visibility into how things are performing online. These are clear areas of challenge that firms must address in order to succeed—and succeed they must, particularly given how much is at stake for businesses in the financial services arena with a legacy back book.

Whilst the message is blunt, there is a ray of hope—a route map of how to move forwards and deliver for customers in this space, with a number of very clear priority “best practice” focus areas:

What’s particularly encouraging in the wider report is the best practice examples and the clear evidence of how seriously the financial services industry is taking this challenge. With high growth expected from delivering the right digital customer experience, the themes from leaders who contributed to the report are clear and consistent: it must start with a strong acquisition journey, everything must be built with mobile at its heart, and personalisation is vital to delivering the best customer experience.

The Nedbank case study is a great example of this—a South African bank falling behind the times and in severe danger of losing its core market. The business used richer customer analytics, simplifying a seven-step process for enrolment down to four, and building mobile-centric forms to further enrich the overall experience online. The number of forms templates dropped from over 200 to just 38 in a short period of time, with strong commercial results to boot.

The killer headline for me—which I completely subscribe to based on what we are seeing at Aviva—is that those organisations who have invested in a better digital customer experience have seen their commercial performance far and away exceed those of slower competitors they are leaving behind. In short, investing in the right digital customer experience helps firms win commercially in both the short and the long term.

The final, but most important, point is the whole experience must be seamless for the customer. No longer can a business offer a disconnected and inconsistent acquisition to service experience. Success lies in the whole, and the devil is absolutely in the detail.

Overall, the report underlines something I believe is true 100%, and has been true in marketing for many years: put your customer first, design products, services, and experience they want and need, and you will succeed. It’s a winning formula.

Read CMO.com’s interview with Aviva’s customer marketing director Lindsay Forster .