Enhancing Customer Acquisition and Retention in a Competitive Landscape

A decade ago, CEOs were focused on cost management. In a recent Gartner survey, when asked to identify their top strategic business priorities for the next 2 years, 49 percent of senior leadership responded “growth” while only 14 percent identified “cost management” as their top objective.

Customer acquisition, retention, and relationship expansion activity throughout the customer journey has dramatically changed in an evolving Omni customer delivery ecosystem. In a hyper-competitive environment with commoditized products, institutions can grow and thrive by creating new revenue streams with a holistic Omni-channel strategy.

Shifts in consumer preference impact acquisition strategy

Financial institutions have lost personal interaction in the early awareness and consideration stages of the customer journey. This can be attributed to a shift toward digital pre-purchase research and consumption. Institutions can solve this issue by enhancing their early prospect and customer detection capabilities with tools that identify guests and quantify needs and purchase propensity.

Automation that identifies and meets customer needs throughout the customer journey is also a crucial component for creating a successful customer acquisition and retention strategy in an Omni-channel environment.

Improving success in customer acquisition

There is a demand for software solutions that perform the heavy lifting for customer acquisition. These types of solutions deliver a strategic advantage for financial institutions, with value-add contributions coming from:

• Increasing customer experience;
• Improving speed in response cycle time;
• Earlier prospect detection;
• Accurate prospect identification;
• Precision propensity qualification;
• Improving engagement timing and relevance; and
• Omni source integration – digital, referral, branch/contact center.

Financial institutions can partner with third-party solution providers to cover the spectrum of high-tech automation to high human touch, optimizing resource allocation, accommodating consumer preference, and expanding their revenue streams.

For more information download our interview: Creating Digital Revenue Streams through Customer Acquisition and Relationship Expansion