Studies show easy access to human assistance remains a key customer satisfaction component. However, COVID-19 accelerated a shift in customer preference toward the empowerment of digital channels. With this shift comes a loss of personal interaction with customers throughout the customer journey, making timely and relevant communication more difficult for the institution.
Staying “customer-connected” serves many purposes, including, exchanging information, solving problems, understanding and meeting needs, answering questions, soliciting feedback, providing assistance, building trust, anticipating and mitigating dissatisfaction, protecting relationships, and adding value.
A successful customer engagement strategy includes active website technology, a multi-channel campaign strategy, self-service financial planning tools, ready access to human assistance, and intelligent surveys for customer feedback. While all these components are important, financial institutions recognize that campaigns are a cost-effective way to ensure engagement is timely and relevant to customer needs, personally targeted, and tailored to optimize the FI’s strategic utilization of technology and human assets.
Essential campaign components and features ensure financial institution engagement strategies deliver success in acquiring leads, assessing and meeting customer needs, obtaining important information and converting opportunities, communicating policy changes, retaining customers and expanding relationships.
A successful campaign framework includes six key components:
- Message Relevance drives campaigns based on known customer needs;
- Target Audience Selection ensures the right individual customer or customer population receives the right communication;
- Breadth of Distribution Options optimize method effectiveness and strategic use of technology and human assets;
- Calls-To-Action provide customers easy access to offers, education, financial planning, and online appointment scheduling;
- Customer Follow-Up equips the institution with valuable customer feedback to measure relevance and satisfaction with processes, products, and services; and
- Management Insight Metrics empower continual process improvement for the institution.
Implementing and executing these components in today’s environment can be challenging for any FI. Available technology solutions empower FIs to capitalize on the ability to detect, quantify, and respond to digital need signals and consumer knowledge, utilizing performance and predictive analytics. By employing digital sensory technology to identify prospects in the awareness and consideration stages, the financial institution engages with a timely and relevant approach.
With increasing knowledge provided by the customer feedback surveys, personalization and strategic timing drive campaign success. Target audience lists enable FIs to direct campaigns based on a wide variety of parameters to maximize the probability of meeting needs and driving conversion.
Enforcing timing rules protects against “communication fatigue” by directing traffic and preventing collisions in the event a consumer enrolled in multiple campaigns. KPIs provide the management insight necessary for ongoing improvement and competitive advantage.
These functionalities provide the institution with the ability to improve timeliness, increase relevance, and optimize effectiveness through targeted campaigns. This extends customer acquisition, experience, fulfillment, and service capability to customers and prospects across their journey stages in an Omni-channel delivery ecosystem.
Todd Robertson is the senior vice president at ARGO, an analytical software producer that creates solutions for financial services including payment transaction processing, sales, service, and relationship management, and retail and commercial lending.