Staying on top of trends in the banking sector

Online relationship banking is a priority for banks to cap customer attrition and offer personalized service 

Trends indicate that five out of eight Indians use online banking and fintech platforms at least 2-3 times a week. And 35% of Indians use banking platforms to view balances, review account activity, and deposit checks.  

Industry statistics indicate that 24.2% of Indians use online banking daily and as many as 23.4% use banking and fintech platforms to chalk out their saving goals. Thus, online banking for Indians means more than just transactional banking on their desktops or phones. On the other hand, they are scouting online for customized and exclusive services and offers, loans to suit their needs and better interest rates on deposits. 

Keeping pace with these new expectations, banks have to work towards transforming from being mere transactional sites to building relationship platforms that give them better customer acquisition and retention.  

Businesses have decoded that customer acquisition is necessary for growth, but customer retention is the lifeline for sustainable growth. One of the main issues cramping the viable growth of banks and fintech businesses is a high rate of customer attrition. Hence the BFSI players have to implement best practices in customer experience like seamless customer onboarding and customer engagement strategies with personalized and omnichannel campaigns. These will help them navigate their retention efforts in the right direction.  

Streamline customer onboarding for great first impressions

Since onboarding is the first-level of interaction a customer has with the bank, the process has to be smooth and continual to support the bank’s goal of keeping customers devoted to their brands. An unhindered onboarding reduces drop-offs by welcoming customers and guiding them through the KYC process with personalized messages. These positive experiences come from a consistent and customer-focused strategy ensuring user needs are met at every touchpoint and interaction. For example, if a customer drops off before their account setup, banks have to keep the conversation going through other channels to bring them on board. 

One of the best ways to retain customers is with consistent, proactive, and individual-focused communication. An interesting finding points out that although customers appreciate communication from their banks through digital channels like email, text, and social media, what they want is personalized and one-on-one content. Banks have to design a communication strategy that is a combination of automated and personal communication. 

Engage using personalized campaigns for evolving and varying needs 

Banking customers want tailored services to match their evolving lifestyle needs and expect their banks to predict their needs, design offers that they can immediately take up.  For example, an offer of a housing loan with an attractive interest rate would fall flat on a 60+ aged banking customer, but would resonate well with a 30+ aged young professional. 

Personalization requires analyzing  appropriate data from the abundance of information that banks receive  from every customer interaction. The filtered data enables predicting customer needs, customizing product recommendations, providing customers with financial solutions and making promotional offers.

They have to use relevant data to create highly targeted campaigns, fine-tune segmentation, and provide delightful customer experiences that yield results. To personalize at scale, banks have to segment their customers beyond basic demographic properties like geolocation, gender, age group, or mobile OS. 

Apart from geographical and demographical fencing, banks have started using psychographic targeting based on measures such as spending behavior, browsing history, web activity, email clicks and opens, and marketing campaign engagements. This also involves psychographic analysis based on customer database, information collected from transactional data, web data, surveys and information from third-party data providers. 

Deploy seamless omnichannel campaigns for uninterrupted experience 

The traditional multichannel approach does not hold water for the modern banking customer. Instead, a seamless fusion of digital and in-person interactions, termed omnichannel, offers customers greater flexibility in fulfilling their requirements and offers banks success in meeting individual customer needs.

Omnichannel campaigns involves borderless integration of online, mobile, in-person, and digital assistants to provide customers with a unified and consistent banking experience. It allows customers to access their accounts and conduct transactions without interruption through multiple channels and also switch between channels sans a break in service.  

Analytics help banks gain crucial insights into customer behaviors like the kind of platforms they use, the frequency of shopping, their purchasing behavior, the devices they use, the issues they face while shopping and how they interact with the brand across each touchpoint. This will help banks identify the right touchpoints and focus on strengthening and connecting with them to make it a seamless and tailor-made experience.  

Therefore, banks and fintech companies that are banking on advanced marketing strategies in the digital age are getting their act together for customer retention and sustainable growth. 

The article has been written by Raviteja Dodda, CEO & Co-Founder, MoEngage