Engaging Customers in the Modern World of Online Banking
The traditional printed bank statement remains a valuable messaging medium for a segment of bank customers to fully and effectively engage customers. Unfortunately, it is a diminishing segment: only around 30% of recipients actually read their printed statements. Banks need to engage customers where they are; and increasingly, that is online.
With an online experience, customers can get the information they need when and where they want now in real-time through online banking portals or via emails or SMS on their phones. It eliminates the need to go to the branch; with a digital experience, banks can bring the branch to their customers.
Understanding Customers – the Missing Piece
Historically, when customers engaged with their banker through a dialogue at the branch, it educated bankers on their needs and provided an opportunity to offer additional products. The goodwill generated by these conversations contributed to customer loyalty and reinforced the value of the banking services they received.
But today, banks have to work harder to replicate that personal touch digitally. To bring the branch to today’s customer requires putting data to work understanding them and personalizing the communications they receive. It requires using a variety of channels to enhance the banking experience, educate customers and deliver relevant offers directly to them in mobile friendly email and SMS experiences.
Unfortunately, many organizations simply don’t have the internal knowledge to easily transition to this. What the banker knew through a personal relationship is now too often locked in core applications or scattered across multiple disparate systems. Banks have vast stores of data that enable them to identify and craft offerings to these customers. They hold purchase history that that can be used to target customers for a home equity line of credit or deliver the right coupons to increase debit card use. But this data is isolated in legacy applications and unavailable to provide a complete view into customers.
The New Customer Conversation
Combining and connecting data to obtain a nuanced view of customers is only a first step. Financial organizations need to be able to build communications that consumers will open, read and act upon. For banks, this can be a challenge. Most have built a communications infrastructure based on transactional mail like monthly statements. These are typically generated through core systems that were built years, even decades, ago. These systems do an excellence job of generating transactional statements, but often can’t be extended to communicate through other channels like SMS. And statements are built in an older generation’s format, one that doesn’t meet the expectations of modern consumers for a more colorful, cleaner statement that contains helpful information and special offers.
This is where a modern customer communication and engagement platform delivers value. Banks can leverage the benefits of marketing functionality for their transactional mail. Bankers are able to apply what they know about customer needs and desires and deliver them on a modern, omnichannel statement. They can offer relevant banking products and services directly on the statements customers receive each month. And, because analytics are captured on customer interactions, bankers can rapidly obtain feedback on the value of different offers, which they can then optimize and extend to other customer segments.
Learn how DataOceans helped one of our banking clients retire their legacy print operations systems and save on the high cost of IT support by moving to hosted managed services. Read a banking case study.