The Power of Personalization: Improving Financial Services CX with Data and Insights

Today’s financial institutions must deliver powerful customer experiences (CX) to stand out from a market saturated with retail banking apps and fintech startups. Modern financial services clients are no longer satisfied with generic offers and mass marketing – they expect hyper-personalized recommendations tailored to their unique needs.

Seventy-two percent of financial customers think a personalized banking experience is significant, but only 44% believe their banks deliver it. There’s much room for financial organizations to close the personalization gap and improve their CX.

Fortunately, the modern financial services experience generates massive amounts of data that organizations can use to build comprehensive user profiles—unlike standard personalization, targeted to generalized customer segments, hyper-personalization drills down to the individual customer.

Financial institutions can use artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and predictive analytics to monitor individual customers’ real-time usage data, such as search terms, geographic locations, and preferred channels. They can turn those insights into one-to-one marketing campaigns or offers specific to each client.

Banks that successfully implement personalized CX at scale can see revenue uplifts, but there are additional benefits of data-based personalization, including:

• Improved customer engagement
• Higher conversion rates
• Greater insights into customer behavior
• Increased customer loyalty
• Long-term ROI

From opening an account to checking rates or requesting advice, each client touchpoint is a chance to provide personalized interactions and differentiated service. These four tips will help future-focused financial institutions integrate hyper-personalization into every communication to improve customer satisfaction and engagement.

1. Take an Omnichannel Approach

Personalization is critical across the customer lifecycle, from acquisition and onboarding to service and engagement. Financial services clients engage with their institutions on a wide variety of channels but expect the same service whether the interaction takes place via:

• Physical branches
• Call centers
• Chatbots and virtual assistants
• Mobile apps
• Social media

Giving clients multiple platforms for engagement means organizations can draw on a wealth of information from cross-channel data to get a 360-degree picture of customer behavior. Each is an opportunity for businesses to collect accurate, consensual, zero-party data directly from users.

AI technology with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities can extract information from unstructured data like customer reviews or social media posts, gathering information about customer sentiment and mood from text or voice input.

This valuable information allows financial institutions to reach customers with highly relevant offers and messages when and where they will most likely be receptive. Contact centers with omnichannel metrics also reduce customer churn, improve resolution rates, and elevate agent satisfaction by providing valuable insights into each interaction.

2. Create a Single Source of Truth

Unfortunately, if financial institutions don’t integrate their platforms, customer identities can get lost in data siloes. It’s frustrating for financial institutions and clients when their information is fragmented across departments and must be tracked down through different systems.

Financial services companies must integrate their tech stacks with APIs and cross-platform data for better interoperability. Having a single data source means more comprehensive insights into customer behavior – on an aggregate and individual level.

For example, an insurance agent can reference a single client’s history and emotions when helping walk them through a claim. On a bigger scale, the insurance company can use AI to collect and analyze data from every interaction to identify broader trends.

3. Build Hyper-personalized Customer Profiles

Businesses have long used segmentation to build customer profiles based on common characteristics like age ranges, income, location, spending habits, or stages in the customer journey. They can then tailor services and communications to a defined profile.

Hyper-personalization takes this to another level by creating a microsegment based on a single user. ML can process and compare recent customer activity with current events to provide real-time, actionable advice.

Say a customer calls the bank’s contact center and gets an advisor who helps them complete a loan application. The customer has a follow-up question and calls/emails/chats back into the contact center. The system will route the customer to the original advisor because it knows they have already talked to that person on their first contact.

Hyper-personalization of CX shows that financial institutions care about their clients beyond just selling them generic experiences. Customers feel more loyal to their banks when agents know their names and can respond to their unique needs.

4. Anticipate Customer Needs

Half of all customers surveyed agree or strongly agree with the statement, “I wish my bank were more proactive about giving me relevant financial information and advice.” Using predictive analytics, financial institutions can anticipate client needs and preferences to get an edge over competitors.

Rather than waiting for customers to request services, organizations can provide targeted suggestions based on historical and current data. They can proactively engage with their clients, using analytics to monitor financial health and offer personalized assistance or opportunities.

Banks can implement this by monitoring customers’ accounts and notifying them if their balance is too low and a recurring charge would result in an overdraft. Being saved an overdraft fee, is value added for the client, who feels more supported by their bank.

Begin the Personalization Process with Mitel

Personalized financial services are no longer optional but are the key to surviving the digital transformation. Banks with mature personalization capabilities were nearly three times more likely to outperform their cross-sell and customer acquisition goals than low-maturity banks.

Personalization is more than just knowing basic information about the client. Financial organizations must show they understand each customer’s journey and offer experiences as unique as they are.

Mitel’s omnichannel unified communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions serve clients on their preferred channel. Integrations with leading finance applications like Jack Henry and Fiserv give agents real-time insights into customer information to provide personalized, meaningful support for every question.

Contact a Mitel financial services expert to learn how your organization can transform customer communications and the CX with personalized, data-led insights.