Demonstrating Empathy Through Technology

Many banks are still trying to determine which consumer preferences and behavior changes are permanent, given the shifts that have occurred over the past 24 months.

During this time period, I’ve spoken with hundreds of bankers and the prevalent theme emerged: The need to respond to customers in a timely fashion, and assurance that there is go-forward alignment with the right business model.

At this point, institutions should consider further exploring ways to refresh customer experience or tackle questions about feasibility, with a focus on defining the strategy for a more competitive customer experience and acquisition structure in today’s digital economy. A strategy that successfully addresses customer needs depends on the ability to project empathy. Executing this in an omni-delivery ecosystem requires financial institutions to effectively listen to their customers’ needs and respond with information or options that are relevant and timely.

There are solutions that financial institutions can leverage today to demonstrate empathy through a listen-respond model. This involves embedding “listening posts” within six functional areas including:

1. Website sensory: Detecting and interpreting customer needs based on digital behavior. Based on this insight, banks can quantify a customer’s intent and propensity-to-purchase and apply decisioning to trigger the “best” engagement, which could include digital advertising, lead capture or engagement campaign deployment through digital or human channels.
2. Customer engagement responses: Applying analytics and decisioning to quantify and respond appropriately to customer interaction with campaigns. Desired responses include launching a survey, clicking a link to complete a fulfillment or accepting an invitation for other services that offered by the institution.
3. Personal financial planner: Obtaining self-disclosed information related to customer needs through unique personal financial planning tools. With goal-centric solutions, the customer selects primary and secondary goals that could include meeting monthly expenses, housing, transportation, education or retirement. The user enters financial information such as income, expenses, assets and debt. By listening to customer goals and financial position, the solution can identify segmentation, quantify customer value index and calculate goal achievability.
4. Omni-channel fulfillment: Tracking fulfillment attempts and automatically deploying abandonment retargeting campaigns to increase conversions. During the fulfillment process, listening posts can detect customer progress through the application. Through fulfillment completion, a bank can use a decision engine to select an appropriate onboarding engagement plan based on the product selected and any additional anticipated needs.
5. Staff interaction: Quantifying and monitoring customer satisfaction and attrition risk scores related to personal engagement. Branch and contact center staff listen physically, but they also contribute to digital listening. For example, missed service-level agreements and customer complaints contribute negatively to customer experience and impact predictive attrition risk, triggering customer action. Banker-assisted fulfillment, followed by positive customer survey feedback, can increase satisfaction scores.
6. Attrition risk: Identifying and quantifying attrition risk factors and proactively and reactively mitigating them. Digital environments can lead to increased customer attrition due to decreased face-to-face engagement.

Solutions can quantify behavior and sentiment indicators based on information that is detected through embedded listening posts. Automated decisioning can respond when thresholds are met and deploy appropriate engagement. Leveraging management insight through key performance indicators and reporting allow banks to monitor, track, execute A/B testing, perform trend analysis and optimize the listening-response model so they can better understand and meet customer needs.

Meeting customer needs requires engagement over time. When banks can understand their customers’ needs through listening and respond with relevant engagement, the customer feels heard, and the institution benefits from increased acquisition, relationship expansion and improved customer experience.