Don’t Go For A ‘Big Bang,’ Advises Aviva’s Global Head Of Digital Marketing

While building a customer-focused business in FSI, it makes sense picking a single-use case and proving the value of digital there, said Mike Oakey at the Adobe Summit.

Customer experience is more important in financial services business than in any other sector, and will be the main way companies in the space differentiate themselves in the future.

That finding, from recent research carried out for Adobe by Econsultancy, was the starting point for the session “How to Build a Customer-Focused Business in FSI” at Adobe Summit EMEA 2017, where three financial services businesses talked about their journey to become more customer-centric (Adobe is CMO.com’s parent company).

Chris Worle, digital strategy director of leading U.K. investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, described the challenge in understanding customer journeys when the average time taken for a lead to convert into business is 11 months.

“We picked a client at random and found that his conversion journey took four months, and involved 12 visits to our website from three devices, and included one call to our help desk. He looked at three products and came through three advertising partners,” Worle explained. “He initially visited to look at the share offer from Rangers Football Club and ended up taking a pension with us.”

Worle’s lesson from this is that, while measurement is critical, companies shouldn’t think they always know what the customer wants, because doing so might result in them not showing offers that might, in fact, have an appeal.

Mike Oakey, global head of digital marketing at U.K. insurance, savings, and investment giant Aviva, talked about three lessons he had learnt from the company’s digital transformation. These were that technology is no longer the barrier to transformation; that it’s essential to bring siloed teams together to work towards a common goal; and that the management at the point where the silos meet must be mutually supportive.

He also offered some thoughts based on his experience in building an agile digital marketing team. He advised against going for a “big bang.” Instead, he recommended picking a single-use case and proving the value of digital there. He also said that, in building the team, bringing them all together in the same location had proved critical. And his final piece of advice was that there’s no point in running a test that can’t scale or become always-on.

Aviva’s Worle also talked about the issue of testing, and the dangers of testing everything rather than concentrating on what really matters. He described how Hargreaves Lansdown had introduced a “Start small, start big” testing philosophy, which meant concentrating on obvious easy wins—on high traffic pages that made a genuine difference to customer experience.

Felix Wenger, head of channel and distribution at Swiss retail bank Raiffeisen, stressed the importance of getting the right infrastructure to underpin the customer experiences you’re trying to create.

“Content is king,” he said, “but infrastructure is queen.”

And he echoed Oakey’s point about demonstrating value through quick wins.

“If you go to your senior management and say: ‘I need two-and-a-half million and in two-and-a-half years, you’re going to have a beautiful infrastructure, and then you can start to market our franchise,’ you probably won’t get the money,” he said. “You need to have a two-to-three year focus, but you need to create quick wins to get the funding.”