Financial institutions face the challenge of identifying customer needs and fostering trust in a digital-first landscape. New business strategies leveraging listening technology allow institutions to detect, interpret, and quantify these needs. This allows institutions to respond with personalized and relevant content utilizing workflow routing through physical and digital channels.
Technology-driven listening and response methods help banks improve customer centricity through a six-pillar framework. Pillars include:
- Know basic needs: Customer satisfaction moved from a subjective subject to a well-researched field of study. Contributing factors to customer satisfaction include a defined list of satisfiers and dissatisfiers. Contributors to customer satisfaction include operational reliability, responsiveness, personal care, fulfillment accuracy and timeliness, intuitive website, and a solid post-purchase process. Dissatisfaction results from fulfillment errors and difficulty, navigation confusion, cumbersome user interface, and lack of access to human assistance. Successful solution design meets fundamental satisfaction needs and eliminates causes of dissatisfaction and frustration.
- Detect specific needs: Digital sensory technology allows the institution to understand customer intent and propensity through detected website navigation and behavior. Listening and quantifying signal strength enables appropriately timed and relevant response engagement. Self-disclosed information provides additional opportunities to listen to the customer. A self-service goal-centric personal financial planning solution enables the customer to share short- and long-term needs as well as current financial position such as income, expenses, assets, and debt in exchange for assistance meeting financial objectives.
- Ask direct questions: Surveys allow customers to provide feedback regarding experience with products, services, staff, and the institution. Immediate and trending responses empower the institution to improve quality over time.
- Suggest solutions: Listening and decisioning technology allows the institution to deploy relevant and timely engagement with product and service offers specifically targeted based on detected and self-disclosed needs.
- Teach consumers: 80% of Americans desire assistance with finances and financial planning, and most of those consider their financial institution a trusted source of information. Educational needs detected through listening channels provide customers with relevant educational content increasing financial literacy and assisting with goal achievement.
- Anticipate future needs: Accumulated customer knowledge increases understanding of segmentation and financial goals. It empowers the institution to meet expressed needs, and it applies pattern recognition to anticipate expansion opportunities.
For more information, download the Staying Customer Connected interview brief.
