Customer Experience: Mystery or Adventure?

The finan­cial ser­vices indus­try faces a series of strong trends requir­ing a shift in focus. These changes are led by the mobile rev­o­lu­tion and the accom­pa­ny­ing growth in con­sumer expec­ta­tions for ser­vice when con­sumers demand it, where they want it, and on the devices they pre­fer in the moment. New finan­cial tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies are ris­ing to fill this demand, with tra­di­tion­al finan­cial ser­vices organ­i­sa­tions work­ing to adopt new tech­nolo­gies to pro­vide expe­ri­ences on par with these agile new­com­ers. Ear­li­er this year I described in a two-part series how the revised Pay­ment Ser­vices Direc­tive will add pres­sures to finan­cial ser­vice organ­i­sa­tions to com­pete in cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. How­ev­er, find­ing the right cus­tomer expe­ri­ence can seem to be a com­plex mys­tery. Today we’ll explore how organ­i­sa­tions can find the clues they need to meet this challenge.

Fol­low the Clues: Lis­ten­ing to Your Customer

You like­ly already have all or most of the clues you need to deliv­er supe­ri­or expe­ri­ences to your cus­tomers. This infor­ma­tion comes in with data on cus­tomers’ behav­iour on your web­sites, on your mobile apps, and in your branch loca­tions. Indeed, for many com­pa­nies the prob­lem is not a lack of data but rather a lack of action­able insights from that data.

You can’t get insight from data if you don’t have an inte­grat­ed view of that data. When clues about cus­tomer behav­iour are stored in dif­fer­ent loca­tions in datasets that can’t inter­act and are owned by many stake­hold­ers, you can’t see how the pieces fit togeth­er or where they lead.

Mod­ern data man­age­ment and ana­lyt­ic tools bring togeth­er these datasets and enable you to con­nect your cus­tomers’ jour­ney across all touch­points and plat­forms. You can see infor­ma­tion such as what ads they came in from, their inter­ests on your site, and their dis­cus­sions with man­agers in your branch­es. When seen togeth­er, these clues give you a clear pic­ture of what the cus­tomer wants, almost as if they were sit­ting there and telling you. From there, you can give them more of what they want dig­i­tal­ly or in per­son and faster than before.

Nation­al Aus­tralia Bank fol­lowed the clues after see­ing that almost 60 per­cent of their cus­tomers were inter­act­ing with them using mobile devices. The bank respond­ed by adding fea­tures from desk­top sites to their mobile app. Appli­ca­tions soared over 400 per­cent in the first week after they added the feature.

Con­nect the Dots and Get Personal

Using shared infor­ma­tion in a col­lab­o­ra­tive man­age­ment sys­tem, inter­de­part­men­tal teams span­ning your busi­ness can get a uni­fied, 360-degree view of your cus­tomers. Real-time reports allow these teams to find high-val­ue cus­tomer seg­ments and per­son­alise the mes­sages to focus on their spe­cif­ic needs. Cus­tomers will see an expe­ri­ence that is more than con­ve­nient. The expe­ri­ence will also be per­son­alised to their needs, based on your com­pre­hen­sive view of their his­to­ry. Expe­ri­ences such as these gen­er­ate greater cus­tomer loy­al­ty, ensur­ing that your com­pa­ny is their go-to choice for all their finan­cial needs.

Guid­ing the Mul­ti-Chan­nel Journey

Each of your cus­tomers is on a finan­cial jour­ney. Their needs will evolve along the way and they will be using all avail­able chan­nels at every stage. Using an inte­grat­ed and com­pre­hen­sive dataset, you can guide this jour­ney with real-time report­ing that lets you know what your cus­tomers are doing and respond with the right expe­ri­ence deliv­ered through the next chan­nel they hap­pen to use. Using this tech­nol­o­gy, if you know that a cus­tomer is look­ing for loan infor­ma­tion on your web­site, you can be sure that the next email they see or direct mail piece they open fol­lows up with more infor­ma­tion tuned to that spe­cif­ic need. A mod­ern data management/analytics sys­tem can be inte­grat­ed with cre­ative to gen­er­ate a cus­tomised mes­sage in real time. The right infor­ma­tion at the right time ensures that every­thing the cus­tomer sees reflects their cur­rent behav­iour and increas­es their satisfaction.

Learn­ing and Adapting

Cir­cum­stances change, needs evolve, and the clues that come in allow you to detect and respond to the inevitable changes. The ana­lyt­ic capa­bil­i­ties of an inte­grat­ed dataset let you see how all your chan­nels and mes­sages are work­ing and pro­vide the oppor­tu­ni­ty to detect and cor­rect a drop in per­for­mance as soon as it aris­es. The key to suc­cess here is to fol­low the right set of met­rics cho­sen to mea­sure the areas you want to improve. For exam­ple, if you are inter­est­ed in mes­sage effec­tive­ness, you might look at met­rics such as open rates or response rates, but if you are look­ing at mobile expe­ri­ence met­rics such as load time or task com­ple­tion will bet­ter inform your decisions.

Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence doesn’t have to be a mys­tery. The foun­da­tion of data-dri­ven mar­ket­ing is a dataset that encom­pass­es your entire oper­a­tion across all chan­nels and touch­points. Cou­pling this dataset to real-time ana­lyt­ics and report­ing trans­forms all of your data into action­able infor­ma­tion, and the insights will fol­low from there as you see a set of facts show­ing you where to focus to build a per­son­al expe­ri­ence that is every­where the cus­tomer is, push­ing your mar­ket­ing to new limits.