Banks need to develop a “Customer Journey Strategy” that helps deliver financial services to their customers based on the customers’ needs and timing, according to an article in BAI Banking Strategies.
The “next best offer” is not what customers want in today’s hyper-connected, always-on world. Instead, they want relevant and timely advice and solutions tailored to their actual needs. They also expect something in return when they provide financial companies with their data.
Given that banks today capture and store an enormous amount of customer data, they should align this data with their overall understanding of their customers’ needs. This can be encapsulated in a “customer journey strategy,” which involves understanding the long- and short-term journeys (think individual path) a customer is on, and architecting how you, the financial provider, can engage to add value when it makes sense.
This article focuses primarily on lending, which is of course most banks’ bread and butter, but the concept can be applied much more broadly. Financial institutions do need to think about how they can help customers achieve all of their financial goals and build portfolios for customers that will increase the customers’ wealth, and hence their value to the bank.
Mercator has explored this concept in its report: The Six Million Dollar Customer: Using Technology to Build a Profitable Customer Base. The key for financial institutions is to think of every customer as having the potential to become a profitable one and use technology to implement tools, products, and strategies that tie the various products together rather than separating them into silos.
Overview by Ben Jackson, Director, Prepaid Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Service Group
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