Financial services: How to leverage data to strengthen customer loyalty
The landscape of modern banking has changed dramatically in the past decade. Financial institutions are facing intense competition not only from traditional competitors, but new cloud-based virtual banks that have appeared with recent technology advancements. Financial Service Institution (FSI) customers expect their institutions to deliver digital-forward, frictionless, and highly relevant experiences across multiple channels. With hundreds of options just a click away, customers are more selective than ever and they won’t hesitate to leave if their needs aren’t being met or exceeded. According to a report by Qualtrics, nearly 70 percent of customers who left their financial institution cited poor service experiences as the reason.
To navigate this competitive market, it’s essential for financial institutions to create the modern, personal experiences customers expect in order to secure their trust and loyalty – and ultimately drive customer retention.
Personalization is the new differentiator for FSI
According to a 2016 benchmarking report by Personetics, only 31 percent of customers think their financial institutions know them and their needs well. This means that nearly a third of current customers are at least relatively dissatisfied with their banking experiences and at risk of churning. In order to strengthen their customer relationships and secure business versus the competition, financial institutions need to start providing their customers with the experiences they expect.
In order to win client loyalty, a new integrated, and data-driven approach is necessary. One that provides the means to personalize the engagement and interaction for every client by:
- Utilizing a holistic client view to create personal experiences based on individual client financial goals.
- Leveraging multiple channels to naturally engage clients when and where it’s convenient for them, creating an authentic customer experience and delivering a seamless, relevant experience at all touchpoints.
- Using data analytics and machine learning to anticipate client needs and prevent problems before they arise.
By leveraging client data in this way, financial institutions can create customized experiences that account for a client’s individual history, household, circumstances, life events, preferred engagement channels, and more.
Enabling intelligent service that keeps customers coming back
By harnessing their client data to derive actionable insights, financial institutions can enable personalized engagements – both online and in person – through unique and situation-based offers, self-service capabilities, and intelligent customer service experiences. By empowering agents with a single, unified view of each client, they can provide customers with the fast, intelligent, and personal service they have come to expect.
Most financial customers are goal-oriented, and they need help reaching those goals. With comprehensive data and insights into their customers’ individual needs and actions, institutions can provide the right offer or service to the right client at the right time, helping them achieve their goals. Machine learning can help derive even deeper patterns from customer data that can predict next-best-actions and make intelligent recommendations tailored to individual customer scenarios.
From highlighting a new account feature based on a customer’s behaviors to suggesting a new local branch based on their location, personalized experiences and recommendations help financial institutions build the lasting relationship with clients that is necessary for success in today’s competitive market. This is a relationship that ultimately results in greater client loyalty and increase of wallet share.
Strengthening trust and reducing churn
In a recent FIS™ Performance Against Customer Experience (PACE) report, customers reported safety and trust as their primary values of importance regarding their relationship with a financial institution, making it absolutely essential for financial institutions to include anomaly and fraud detection in their efforts to strengthen client loyalty and retention. By leveraging AI to analyze customer data in search of suspicious or unusual activity, financial institutions can identify and resolve potential issues even before they arise.
Behavioral analysis also enables active churn prediction, identifying actions and behaviors that indicate a customer is about to leave. This provides an opportunity to re-engage those at-risk customers to address any dissatisfaction, as well as deliver personally tailored offers that can help win back the customer’s trust and avoid potential losses.
How a customer data platform can help
Financial institutions can collect both structured (e.g., client profiles, historical information) and unstructured (e.g., archived email correspondence, agent notes, etc.) client data across many systems and channels. Yet without the ability to effectively unify all of this data, it can be difficult or impossible to derive the holistic customer profiles and actionable insights necessary to personalize the customer experience and drive retention.
With an enhanced customer data platform like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, companies can bring together their customer data from all sources to gain a truly 360-degree view of their customers, unlocking insights that power personalized, authentic engagement at every touchpoint.
3 ways to learn more about Customer Insights
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- Watch our webinar— Personalized Experiences with a 360-Degree View of Your Customers—for a closer look at how Customer Insights helps your marketing, sales, and service professionals tailor digital and one-to-one customer interactions at scale.
- Visit the Customer Insights website to explore the features, read customer stories, and view additional resources.
- Watch Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Head of Product Satish Thomas demonstrate Customer Insights:
[msce_cta layout=”image_center” align=”center” linktype=”blue” imageurl=”https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2019/07/Satya.png” linkurl=”www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBB6I2EU2xo” linktext=”Watch Customer Insights video” ][/msce_cta]
