As consumers, these days we only want to know what’s in it for us. We will no longer accept an onslaught of irrelevant messages and advertising. Although that might mean some industries will struggle, banks are in a fortunate position to understand their customers like no other business.
With a window into quality insights such as a person’s outgoings, income and savings patterns, banks are able to start building up a detailed customer profile on spending habits, device usage and preferred communication methods. This 360-degree view enables banks to deliver the level of customer experience consumers crave – producing contextually relevant content and distributing it via the channel of choice for the customer.
Personalisation will be critical to the future success of banks. And with nearly half of traditional UK bank customers admitting they would happily switch their current account to either a challenger bank, retailer or fintech company in 2017, the pressure, to get it right, is on.
Learning from example
Spain’s CaixaBank has led from the front and is one of the first banks to provide mobile banking users with predictive tools. They can predict customer trends such as likely future spending based on spending history and past behaviour, rather than simply the payments customers have manually set up.
It’s encouraging to see that other top-performing banks are following suit and are starting to introduce substantial improvements – offering a wider range of transactional features and functionality, providing better guidance across digital touchpoints and promoting additional services in context. But in order for banks to succeed, they need to revaluate their mobile customer journeys and orchestrate a wide variety of communication channels to make use of the wealth of data at their fingertips.
Finance with Facebook
Our research shows that the top-performing banks have heavily invested in cross-channel technology over the past 12 months. Taking note of the trend that more and more people now opt to use private messenger platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, to stay in touch in their friends and families, a number of banks have made headway in embracing social media as a channel of communication to engage with their customers.
Such investments make complete sense – it is reported the combined use of the top four messaging apps now exceeds that of the top four social media apps. Therefore, with apps like Messenger now a pervasive component of everyday consumers’ lives, banks would be missing a trick to not see this as an effective channel for engaging with customers.
Perhaps, then, it’s time for financial institutions to take a leaf out of Turkish bank DenizBank’s book. With 34 million Facebook users in Turkey, DenizBank spotted an opportunity to reach its customers through the communication channel they were spending the majority of their time on each day. Creating a new channel through Facebook banking to allow people to transfer money, manage assets and talk to customer care representatives, DenizBank was able to offer its customers a fast, convenient solution to connected banking. The results? Happy, engaged customers.
Fighting off the competition
As international banks such as DenizBank and CaixaBank strengthen their digital offerings, competition in the financial sector is only going to get fiercer. It’s never been more important for traditional UK banks to finally begin orchestrating cross-channel communications to deliver contextually relevant and convenient experiences, which ultimately boost customer satisfaction.
Banks have the rare opporutnity to reinvent themselves and those that take the leap now, and invest in technology solutions that help them talk the langauge of their customers, will undeniably find themselves becoming the bank of choice for the 44.2 million smartphone users in the UK. Those that don’t will be left behind.
To read more, download our whitepaper ‘Mobile Banking: The Vital Role of Cross-Channel Communications in 2017’ today.
