In a Redpoint Global survey conducted by Dynata Research, 82 percent of customers said that it is important for their bank to understand them as a customer and personalize experiences so that they are relevant and valuable. Yet only 38 percent report that their primary bank is meeting this expectation. And while 88 percent expressed a desire for banks to provide a seamless experience across all channels (brand, website, mobile app, call center), just 44 percent said their bank was “somewhat effective” at meeting this goal. The research reveals major gaps in customer expectations for a personalized and seamless banking experience across channels and a financial institution’s ability to meet those expectations.
These roughly 2X gaps have the potential to widen with more consumers turning to digital channels as a primary banking option; in the same survey, 44 percent of consumers said they’ve increased digital banking habits in the past year (26 percent said that they already did most of their banking via digital channels or an ATM).
What types of experience contribute to the experience gaps? While the ability to apply for a loan online is a fairly standard offering, most institutions still do not offer the capability on a mobile device. Or they let a customer start the process online, but require an in-person visit to finish it. For customers, these inconsistencies or inconveniences create friction by requiring multiple interactions for what should be a simple process. Worse yet, customers often have to deal with various business functions that do not share account information or have a shared view of the customer’s journey.
Closing the Experience Gap
Consumer expectations for seamless experiences across channels are not unique to banking, but financial institutions do have unique sets of challenges. First, they have less of a head start than other industries such as retail, where Amazon and others blazed a trail for customer-centricity and a digital-first approach. In the Redpoint survey, in fact, 67 percent of consumers said that retailers do a much better job of delivering personalized experiences than their bank. Second, as highly regulated entities responsible for protecting sensitive financial institutions, banks have been slow to roll out digital services or to break down channel, data and product siloes.
Complex legacy IT systems, and a general resistance to change are reasons why, according to Financial Brand’s State of Digital Banking Transformation report, fewer than 50 percent of financial institutions believe they are prepared for customers’ digital expectations. (And just 12 percent self-identify as digital “leaders.”)
Because banks work with sensitive data, they have ensured that financial data is accurate and clean. Yet consumer expectations go beyond this, as a true understanding of a customer requires banks to know their preferences, their life stages, their contact history and many other insights. Banks have fallen short of integrating all of this information across channels and product lines, and they also have difficulty responding to customers across anonymous-to-recognized and anonymous-to-known customer journeys.
Another opportunity for banks is to improve their recognition of various relationships and households. Redpoint is working with several regional banks who, for various reasons, have a difficult time matching multiple accounts to a household. In most consumer industries, householding issues are usually the result of deterministic and probabilistic matching difficulties or errors, such as not linking accounts because an address doesn’t match (St. vs. street, etc.). For these regional banks, householding is more an issue with multiple members of a household living at different addresses, which becomes even more complicated when commercial accounts are introduced. Determining and servicing the centers of influence in today’s world has become increasingly difficult.
Meet Expectations with a Golden Record
This lack of visibility into a relationship between accounts makes it difficult for the banks to create a holistic experience for account holders engaging in different channels. Redpoint solves for this issue by creating a single customer view that links a center of influence with all associated accounts, addresses and account holders.
The Redpoint Golden Record is an accurate, complete, holistic picture of an individual customer that brings together customer data from every source across the enterprise. In addition to account data, the Golden Record integrates contact history, behavior data, demographic data, transaction history and any other relevant data across the enterprise. Our regional bank partners choose Redpoint, in part, because of the advanced identity resolution capabilities in the Redpoint CDP that creates a 360-degree customer view that makes it possible to virtually eliminate generic or misguided messages. By eliminating siloes around the centers of influence, the Redpoint CDP facilitates targeted, hyper-personalized engagements and experiences that are relevant for an individual customer – not the account.
As the Dynata Research shows, customers expect their banks to deliver value and relevance. For financial institutions large or small, creating a single customer view through a Golden Record is an important first step toward meeting demands for seamless, personalized and digital-first experiences.
More results from the Redpoint banking survey conducted by Dynata Research can be found here. To discover how one global financial services firm accelerated speed-to-value for its marketing programs with a unified customer view and a single point of operational control, click here.
