6 Tactics to Win Customer Engagement

One topic that’s commonly discussed in financial institution boardrooms is how to serve customers and meet their expectations. This topic is especially pertinent now that consumer expectations are at an all-time high.

Bank consumers want delightful, simple customer experiences like the ones they get from companies like Uber Technologies and Airbnb, and they’re more than willing to walk away from experiences that disappoint. As a result, financial institutions are under immense pressure to engage and retain customers and their deposits. Bankers cannot afford to stand idly by and watch a generation of customers increasingly lean on fintechs for all their financial needs.

Fortunately, your financial institution can take action to win the battle for customer engagement – some are already doing so with initial successes. Incumbents like Bank of America Corp. use financial assistants powered by artificial intelligence to assist customers, and fintechs such as Digit offer an auto savings algorithm to help people meet their financial goals. These efforts and features bring the disparate components of a consumer’s financial life together through:

• An intense focus on the user experience.
• Highly personalized experiences.
• “Do it for me” intelligent features.
• The right communications at the right time.
• Intuitively-built and highly engaging user interfaces.

How can your bank offer experiences like these? It comes down to equipping your financial institution with the right set of data and tools.

1. Data Acquisition: Data acquisition is the foundation of customer experience.
The best tools are based on accurate and comprehensive data. The key here is that your bank needs to acquire data sourced not only from your institution, but to also allow customers to aggregate their data into your experience. The result is that you and your customers can see a full financial picture.

2. Data Enrichment: Use data science to make sense of unstructured data.
Once your bank has this data, it’s critical that your institution deploys an enrichment strategy. Advanced data science tactics can make sense of unstructured and unrecognizable transaction data, without needing to add data scientists to bank staff. Transforming these small and seemingly unimportant bits of the user experience can have a huge overall effect.

3. Data Intelligence: Create personalized and timely user experiences from the data.
By consistently looking at transactional data, data intelligence tools can identify different patterns and deliver timely, unique observations and actionable insights to help consumers improve their financial wellbeing. These are the small, but highly personalized user experiences that fintechs have become known for.

4. Data Productization: Provide a user interface with advanced pre-built features.
One of the most difficult things for a bank to pull off is data productization. The right tooling and advanced, pre-built features allow banks to unite data and analysis and encapsulate it into intuitively designed digital experiences. This way, consumers can engage naturally with your bank and receive relevant, personalized products and services they need from you. Digital notifications can be part of your strategy, and many customers opt in to receive them; case in point is that 90% of the customers using a Goals-Based Savings application from Envestnet opt into notifications.

5. AI Automation: Utilize AI to enhance self-service capability.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could ask someone to cancel a check at anytime? Or type in a question and get the answer on the spot? Tools like AI-powered virtual assistants with an automation layer make it simple for consumers to do all this and more, wherever they are. Financial institutions using the Virtual Financial Assistant from Envestnet have automated up to 87% of contact center requests with a finance domain-specific AI.

6. Trusted Partners: Leverage partner to compete.
Competing with fintechs often means, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” But leveraging trusted partners is a tried and true strategy. Your bank’s partner could be a traditional financial institution you’ve pooled assets with to create and embed financial technology deep into your experience. It could be a fintech focused on business-to-business capabilities. Or it could be a partner offering world-class data aggregation as well as analytics and innovative tools to enhance your customer experience.

Fintechs have done a phenomenal job at connecting the disjointed components of consumers’ financial lives through amazing customer experiences. Your financial institution can do the same. By using the right data and tools and partnering up, your bank can deliver the personalized experiences consumers expect, delight and empower them to take control of their finances and future.