The Benefits of Bank Customer Engagement

Customer experience is your customers' perception based on everything they see, hear, or learn about your business. Alternatively, customer engagement is the process of interacting with your customers across all channels to strengthen the overall relationship. The customer experience and engagement process begins before an account is opened and continues throughout the customer journey.

To create a more positive experience, banks and credit unions can engage with customers in personalized ways through direct mail, email, social media, mobile banking platforms, websites, or any other channel where contextual interactions occur. The power of new technologies and digital tools contributes to the most important element of customer digital engagement in banking. From monitoring transactions and customer inquiries to requesting information about financial goals, listening builds relationships and enables an organization to provide a personalized solution.

Using technology to drive banking customer engagement
Customer data is the fuel of this engine. Modern engagement platforms use AI-powered tools along with internal and external data to automate interactions, creating a personalized experience that encourages a prospect to open an account and a customer to develop a relationship.

The beauty of combining data, advanced analytics, and modern communication platforms are that you can anticipate needs, create personalized responses to large-scale demands, create new products and services for micro-segments and retarget potential customers in real-time. By creating a seamless and streamlined communication cycle, teams can focus on innovation, personalized outreach, and learning from previous communication efforts.

A data-driven approach to engagement goes beyond the power of simple incentives and special offers to deliver relevant content that customers value. As customers become familiar with your highly personalized communication process, they will often come to your brand before others for their future needs. If your content provides value (from the customer's perspective), there is a much higher tolerance for increased amounts of communication. This equates to more opportunities.

Strategies for Successful Banking Customer Engagement

Creating an exceptional customer experience using powerful engagement strategies spans the entire customer journey, using all channels and departments in your organization.

Key strategies in digital banking engagement:

• Know your destination. As with any initiative, you can't reach your goal if you haven't defined your destination. What will customer engagement look like in your organization. Which components can be implemented today and which may have to wait? Will your engagement strategy include proactive recommendations based on data and AI? Will your organization create accessible content on demand? How will your employees be involved?

• Engage your employees. Identify who in your organization will play a role in customer engagement and get their collaborative buy-in. This will help avoid any reservations around the process and help build a comprehensive strategy that engages the customer across channels and throughout the customer journey.

• Identify your target audiences. Identify who you will target for communication. Will you focus on one customer segment or your entire base? Once you've selected your target audience, you need to understand the sub-segments preferred engagement styles. For example, who showed a preference for digital communication versus agency engagement? Also, identify the financial needs of your target customers and what motivates their decisions.

• Create content. Create customer-focused content and communication flow. Make sure the content is personalized for the target audience and reflects the information you know about them.

Use modern technology. Whenever possible, leverage the most appropriate automation and communication tools that can allow you to simplify an increasingly complex engagement process and track results.

Measure results on a macro and micro basis. Monitor the success of all your activities against initial goals and on a campaign basis. Gather feedback from internal teams as well as third-party vendors you have engaged in the process. Also, collect feedback from the customers you've targeted to determine what worked and what didn't. Simply tracking sales results is not enough given the longer-term nature of engagement communication.

Modify tactics and strategies in real-time. The technology and tools available for a customer engagement process can provide immediate feedback on results. Take advantage of these comments as soon as they are available instead of waiting a month, a quarter, or a year in the future.