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A Case for Building Better Customer Engagement in the Financial Services Sector

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A Case for Building Better Customer Engagement in the Financial Services Sector A Case for Building Better Customer Engagement in the Financial Services Sector A Frost & Sullivan White Paper Hiral Jasani, Industry Analyst, Digital Media Practice Mukul Krishna, Senior Global Director, Digital Media Practice frost.com The Check is in the Mail: A Market in Transformation ............................................................. 3 The Straw that Broke the Marketer’s Bank ............................................................................... 4 Lack of centralized customer data management, real-time reporting and single view of customers ............................................................................................................. 4 Inability to access actionable insights and measure ROI on marketing.................................. 4 Omni-channel marketing still a pipe dream for many ............................................................. 5 Marketing to Today’s Savvy Buyers .............................................................................................. 6 Reactive to Proactive: Understanding the Customer in Real Time .......................................... 7 Empowering Marketers with the Right Tools and Information ................................................ 8 Using the Right Channel to Engage with Customers at the Right Time with the Right Content ............................................................................................................... 9 Technology to the Rescue ............................................................................................................ 11 The Bottom Line ........................................................................................................................... 13 Marketer’s Need Assessment ...................................................................................................... 14 contents A Case for Building Better Customer Engagement in the Financial Services Sector THE CHECK IS IN THE MAIL: A MARKET IN TRANSFORMATION The Financial Services Sector (FSS) has seen transformational changes and undergone a period of massive overhaul following the financial crisis that rattled this market six years ago. The turmoil created a major setback as financial institutions had to make some significant changes in order to re-establish trust and re-evaluate long-term profitability, while stabilizing the resources spent on protecting customers. They have to be very high on capital and liquidity, but are limited in their ability to maximize their sources of revenue. Most importantly, financial services have had to start from the ground up in finding sustainable ways of re-establishing customer trust while building new relationships and restoring old ones. Most importantly, financial services have had to start from the ground up in finding sustainable ways of re-establishing customer trust while building new relationships and restoring old ones. The Financial Services Sector is vast and encompasses commercial and investment banks, insurance, wealth management, asset management, private equity, venture capital, credit unions and non-bank institutions such as debt collectors, credit reporting agencies, brokerages, and those services that offer residential mortgages, education and payday loans. Due to the high proliferation of devices and rapidly improving broadband connectivity, the target customer today tends to be much more engaged across multiple marketing channels—on and offline. One misstep, such as sending wrong/irrelevant/redundant information across the wrong channel to customers, could easily send customers or prospects to competitors who today are just a click away. In 2014, Frost & Sullivan research found that the global general IT investment in the FSS marketplace was USD 8.1 billion, with the US alone accounting for USD 3.2 billion. At a CAGR of 4.7%, this spend is expected to reach USD 10 billion globally by 2018. In contrast, Frost & Sullivan found that the investment by FSS companies for customer engagement-specific technologies was at just over USD 1 billion in 2014 and is expected to grow to well over USD 4 billion by 2020 at a CAGR of a whopping 22%. These numbers are very telling as they show not only how critical customer engagement is for the FSS companies, but also how much more important it will become over the next few years. Online and mobile banking have opened up new avenues of customer touch points, and created new opportunities for customer engagement and business growth. Increasing customer expectations, coupled with elevating price sensitivity, have compelled FSS companies to revisit their customer engagement strategy and identify effective ways of enriching customer relationships. All rights reserved © 2015 Frost & Sullivan 3 frost.com THE StRAW THAT BROKE THE MARKETER’S BANK For FSS companies, the need for better customer engagement is a critical competitive factor and is well understood, but the path is fraught with numerous challenges. The customer cannot be taken for granted and customer outreach is increasingly being dictated by how, when and where the customers prefer to be contacted, and not at the whim of the financial services company. Through its research, Frost & Sullivan has uncovered the following key pain points identified by the FSS community as some of the most critical issues they are currently dealing with when it comes to customer engagement. Lack of centralized customer data management, real-time reporting and single view of customers FSS organizations have been plagued with the silo culture for decades, the side effects of which have trickled all the way down to their technology adoption. The fact that FSS has large volumes of proprietary data adds to the problem. Often, inter-departmental sharing is limited and a single customer may have multiple interactions with the company with little or no internal transparency about these customer touch points. Organizations typically do not have a central place for dashboards, where key decision-makers can view and access a centralized database. This severely affects the ability of marketers to collect all relevant information of a given customer and build a real-time, complete profile of a customer by tying all the channels together. It is critical for a FSS marketer to have a unified view of a customer so they may access the customer’s profile in real time for more contextual, personalized communications. The intelligence derived from a single, complete view of the customer empowers marketers to have a high probability of success to drive profitable customer interactions. Often, inter-departmental sharing is limited and a single customer may have multiple interactions with the company with little or no internal transparency about these customer touch points. Inability to access actionable insights and measure ROI on marketing Given the inter-departmental differences discussed above, the ability to make an investment in technology is a big challenge as each department may have different needs. Due to regulatory constraints, a technology purchase plan goes through several layers of approvals, delaying the entire planning cycle. Most of all, decision- makers in FSS are struggling to understand that technology that enables better customer engagement brings substantial benefits to an organization; it as an investment, rather than an expense. Most of all, decision-makers in FSS are struggling to understand that technology that enables better customer engagement brings substantial benefits to an organization; it as an investment, rather than an expense. 4 All rights reserved © 2015 Frost & Sullivan A Case for Building Better Customer Engagement in the Financial Services Sector Due to the enormity of the task and unavailability of resources, FSS companies typically outsource their marketing and communication services to agencies. As these agencies do not have access to proprietary customer information or insight into the various ways customers are interacting directly with the financial institution, they lack the capability to create meaningful customer profiles that would lead to highly personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. Concerns around privacy further add to the skepticism. Cisco IBSG study indicates that 65% of the respondents from developed countries had significant concerns about privacy, security and identity theft. To add to the conundrum, Frost & Sullivan’s analysis of current versus future prevalence of technology applications shows that FSS companies continue to use a wide range of technologies, with many use cases of competing and redundant technologies existing within the same company in different departments. This results in confusion over which tools are the most effective and who has business ownership of the data and technology. Omni-channel marketing still a pipe dream for many For a typical FSS company, customer interaction takes place on a number of channels, such as chat, Intelligent Voice Recognition (IVR), email, social and mobile apps. With the digital transition, customers expect the same level of personal touch, irrespective of which channel they use. Consumer engagement across mobile and social media has seen a rapid boost, especially in the retail banking industry. A 2014 US Federal Reserve Board report on financial services found that 51% of smartphone users used mobile banking over the past year. In terms of means of access, ATMs were used 75% of the time, online banking was used 72% of the time, telephone banking was used 33% of the time, and mobile banking
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