Hotels, realtors and concert tickets: How banks are becoming more relevant in customers’ daily lives
Today’s financial landscape is drastically different from that of just five years ago. Banks are under pressure to differentiate themselves from the competition and many are struggling to retain customers who view banking primarily as mundane and transactional: paying bills, viewing accounts and checking statements.
In response, banks are going beyond their traditional boundaries to find ways of addressing more than standard financial needs. They’re extending their digital ecosystem, working with partners in industries like insurance, transportation, utilities and more to offer a greater range of services—and customers are loving it.
Banks are going beyond their traditional boundaries
Studies reveal customers are in favor of banks extending their reach to an advisory role, taking a relationship-driven approach to improving the customer’s financial well-being.1 They want banks that can help them find cars, not just finance them. Banks that recommend neighborhoods and realtors for a simplified home-buying experience. Banks that provide discounts and personalized offers when they travel. In short, banks are engaging in more financial decisions throughout customers’ daily lives.
For banks to compete in this new financial landscape, they need to grow their digital ecosystem and retain customers by:
- Proactively recommending financial advice
- Collaborating with other industries that are also involved in financial decisions
By enabling customers to do more than just perform transactions, banks have a huge opportunity to get customers to stick, while creating new revenue opportunities for themselves and for other businesses.
Be proactive
Consider this: 58% of millennials expect their bank to be proactive and feel that banks could increase customer loyalty by offering tools to help them save money.1 Banks that deliver on this need by using customer data to recommend relevant offerings or provide personalized financial services are winning—and retaining—customers.
Banks have vast amounts of customer information available from ongoing interactions, contact information, customer surveys, etc. Applying advanced analytics to these massive stores of customer data means that your employees don’t have to guess what customers might want. Better still, they won’t have to wait for customers to come to them: this data can be used to anticipate customer needs.
| For example, a customer applies for financing and buys a new car every three years. Knowing their existing finance package ends in six months, their bank leveraged a partnership with a local car dealership to present a financing offer with a lower APR for that customer. By identifying this customer’s unique spending patterns, this bank was able to strengthen the relationship.
Proactively driving the customer relationship using deep customer insights is the future of banking, and early adopters of this approach have an edge over the competition. |
Be collaborative
Innovation that captures and delights customers requires a collaborative approach. Today’s consumer is a shared one: a single customer interaction can be split across multiple industries and transactions.
| For example, when a customer upgrades their phone and pays using their bank debit card, this presents a joint opportunity. By partnering with mobile providers, banks can enable customers to manage their account and payment plan seamlessly.
In another example, a bank is able to analyze customer spending patterns in a particular area and finds there are many families in the area purchasing fast food meals during the week. With this view, the bank partners with a local pizzeria to create a promotion for weeknight dining. Through this promotion, the pizzeria reaps revenue gains and customers see their bank as more relevant to their daily lives. |
One aspect of driving a strong and lasting customer relationship is understanding and anticipating customer needs—throughout all parts of their lives. Customers make financial decisions everyday that may seem unrelated to their bank. By partnering with other firms in verticals like home goods, transportation, travel, insurance, and real estate, leading banks are becoming a bigger, more relevant part of customers’ lives.
How innovative banks are expanding their offerings outside of financial services
| Real estate services
Navigating a complex housing market can be challenging—from understanding your loan options to getting financial documents organized and finding the right neighborhood. Innovative banks are helping customers with more than mortgages and loans. Banks are helping customers find areas and homes that fit their needs and their budgets and even connecting them to local real estate agents. Car-buying guidance Buying a car is a big process: researching, locating, trying and negotiating prices. It can be stressful and time-consuming. By recommending vehicles that fit a customer’s needs and preferences, banks help align car shoppers with their dream car much faster, with more confidence. |
Deliver new services through an extended ecosystem
Making sure customers get the right offers—whether it’s a real estate agent, a restaurant discount or a great car—is no easy task. By understanding customer needs and preferences and forming strategic partnerships, banks have critical building blocks, but what’s also needed is the technology to make it all happen.
VeriPark Next Best Action, built on Microsoft Cloud Technology, is a solution that collects customer data from a wide variety of customer contact points: email, mobile apps, service center calls, in-branch conversations, ATM use and other channels.
Using the big data and advanced analytics capabilities of Cortana Intelligence Suite, including machine learning, VeriPark Next Best Action aggregates and analyzes data from all touch points to recommend the optimal next action to take with an individual customer. Whether it’s connecting them to local realtors or granting extra points for gas purchases, banks that partner with other service providers have a huge opportunity to provide an enhanced customer experience and stay ahead of the competition. VeriPark Next Best Action can help banks bring it all together.
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Start your trial of VeriPark Next Best Action at AppSource.com.
Sources
1 Accenture, “The Digital Disruption in Banking”
