Today’s banking marketer faces new challenges within an ever-changing market space. The business challenges have evolved over the past decade and growth strategies have lagged. With the end of historic growth rates through acquisition, banking marketers must find new ways to penetrate the market. A personalized experience to attract new customers and an increased ability to cross sell, up sell, retain, and expand existing customer relationships is the only way to make the numbers. Banks struggle with having a holistic view of their customers across all their products and portfolios and must begin to approach customer engagement from a single view of the customer within their operational and analytical decisioning environments across all channels. In essence, the banking marketer must be able to reach customers across all channels with a singular and consistent message.
These challenges cascade into technical challenges, each of which speak to the need for cross organizational, horizontal views of data and intelligence across customer, prospect, channel, and time rather than traditional vertically siloed views. This enormity of this challenge can result in marketing, business, and IT Leaders losing patience with lengthy programs that don’t deliver, the difficultly of executing personalization, and the lag in business events actually impacting the customer experience.With the rise of digital channels and growing insight from social media, the historical challenges of integrating across line of business data is further complicated. There’s now the added layer of bringing in unstructured data from these channels to enable the holistic, integrated customer experience. The customer journey must evolve and be capable of a personalized experience across channels while maintaining continuity of the messaging.
Banks must address these challenges and turn them into change. To do so, they should consider these six key elements:
- Data Quality is Vital — The quality of your data is foundational as is your ability to effectively link data across the customer journey and channel deliver relevant, personalized experiences.
- Inventory Your Data Assets — Although a full Data Governance program is not necessary, it is important to know where your data resides, who is responsible for it, and what gaps exist.
- Link Projects to Business Outcomes — Align your investment in data and analytics to actionable business outcomes.
- Make Solid Investments in Technology — Have a roadmap and start small. Having a program feel like a series of small projects all built to a common goal will greatly increase your chances of success.
- Integrate the Process — Ensure tight integration of the technology stack across the lines of business and channel.
- Look to the Future — Through predictive analytics, you will increase insight to determine what the customer may do next.
For further reading on this topic, Banking Exchange recently published an article, authored by me, that covers similar information.
