Three Considerations for Digital Banking Success

The nation’s top financial institutions share a few common strategic imperatives: growing share of wallet and maximizing J.D. Power rankings. In order to realize that vision, banks and credit unions are prioritizing digital, mobile and customer experience initiatives, which Fiserv reports are three of the largest points of focus in 2015.

Consumers now expect their financial institutions to deliver a digital experience that mirrors other consumer-friendly industries such as retail, travel and hospitality. This leaves marketers to digitize the customer journey and push adoption of their digital channels to keep pace with consumer expectations.

Many are doing this by delivering personalized, timely recommendations designed to improve the customer’s experience while encouraging use of digital tools and services. Using video – the most engaging digital medium – for personalized communication only enhances the experience and increases the odds for initial and sustained behavioral change.

There are a few key factors required for banks and credit unions to successfully implement a digital-first strategy based on personalized video engagement:

1. Centralized data: Personalizing videos requires accessible and addressable first-party customer data. Banks can then engage customers with unique stories based on each individual’s profile, interests, transactional history and current behavior. Creating a centralized data source that pulls in data from across the organization allows companies to create a seamless digital experience at every touch point.

2. Organizational alignment: Maintaining data from different sources – and managing a coherent and consistent messaging strategy across departments or lines of business – requires buy-in across the organization. Financial institutions have taken different approaches to assigning responsibility for the customer-facing digital strategy, creating positions such as the chief digital officer, chief experience officer or marketing technologist. With the increasing importance of video as a storytelling medium, many companies are creating horizontal groups responsible for the strategy, creation and management of video for use across the organization.

3. Cross-channel engagement: Maintaining a centralized data source provides full visibility into the preferences and behaviors of the customer base across every interaction – from branch transactions to browsing history to support calls. Communications at every customer interaction should be informed by a single data repository so that messages reflect a customer’s most recent engagements and companies can consistently engage a customer across channels in a connected manner.

A digital-first strategy reinforces the use of digital tools and channels as the primary approach for future interactions, while also recommending changes that lift the value of each customer and improve the customer experience. With a data-driven, personalized approach, financial institutions can expand customer relationships, drive incremental revenue and gain a strong competitive advantage.

Says Jim Marous of The Financial Brand, “One of the foundational components of a truly digital organization is a shared 360-degree view of the customer. Each potential customer touchpoint should be able to easily monitor the customer relationship as well as any communication stream from a central database.” Following these three tips enables a 360-degree view and sets financial institutions up for digital success.