How can data-driven customer insights help boost digital banking sales? Scroll down for insights and related use cases that can be implemented easily and without a high price tag.
Data solutions have revolutionised marketing activities, allowing banks to create insight-driven campaigns and send personalised, relevant and timely messages to customers. Derived from various types of data, insights can basically help you predict what products or services customers are likely to buy.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll bring you a bunch of examples on this blog to show you how exactly insights work. Let’s start with relatively simple insights and related use cases, which offer great results and carry low risks. You’ll see that developing customer insights doesn’t have to be a complex and pricey process: there are insights that you can implement pain-free and without breaking the bank.
Relevant messages based on digital use
One of the most simple customer insights focuses on customers’ digital use. It helps financial institutions analyse how individual clients use their online and mobile banking channels, what digital products or services they might be interested in, as well as what problems they have faced during product applications or when using other functions.
This is a real-time insight that also tracks recurring events. It can show the number of log-ins in the mobile banking app in a week, how many transfers the customer makes in a month, how often they abandon digital transactions or if the customer clicks on a specific function multiple times over a particular period of time.
Running on aggregated channel analytics data, the insight allows financial institutions to generate individual results for specific digital functions or get a wider picture of the customer’s engagement, for example, by examining all their digital transfers, regardless of the channel. It comes particularly in handy for providing assistance or advisory to banking clients and thus boosting engagement and loyalty.
Use cases include the following:
- Peter used to bank at the local branch near his home but has recently switched to online banking to save time and avoid the long queues at the branch. He transfers child maintenance every month to his ex-wife and makes recurring payments to utility companies. His bank detects these repeating transactions and offers him a standing order and a direct debit for payments.
- Andrew regularly tops up his son’s prepaid mobile account, typically once a month, to help him make ends meet. Having identified the recurring partner’s name and the phone number used, the system automatically selects the mobile company for Andrew during the next transaction, improving his banking experiences significantly.
- Mr. Jakubczyk has moved to Oslo for a new job and wants to send some money home to his family in Poland. He receives his salary in euros to his local bank account and converts some of it to zlotys before transferring it to his wife’s Polish account. But he often experiences technical problems, which results in failed transactions. His local bank detects these failures and instructs customer service to provide support to him over the phone and find out what has gone wrong. Customer service can also offer him a foreign currency account or a standing order.
- Joan has recently inherited a significant amount of money from her grandfather but can’t figure out how to invest it. She normally uses her bank’s mobile app, which has a savings function offering various types of investment and saving options. Joan has clicked on it several times over the past week to explore the possibilities but is yet to make up her mind about what the right product is for her. Her bank has been tracking her clicks in the app and sends her a push message with an offer: a mutual fund investment promising an attractive yield.
In the right place, at the right time
Another fairly simple customer insight uses real-time information about the customer’s current whereabouts. The customer’s mobile device sends location data to the bank through the mobile banking app if the client has given permission to do so. The insight can differentiate between various types of frequently visited locations and can also tell where the customer lives or works. The bank can also set up relevant locations (with GPS and radius data) based on preferences.
This solution works best for identifying the customer’s location with a radius of 50-100 meters, which means you can target clients when they are at the local shopping center, a supermarket or even at an open-air concert. The insight offers plenty of opportunities for banks to cross-sell or upsell products to existing clients and transmit third-party offers to generate additional revenues.
Let’s see some examples of how it works:
- Mary, who’s been looking to buy a new electric car, arrives at a car dealership to check out current offers. The bank detects her whereabouts based on its pre-determined setup of relevant locations, and sends a real-time push message to her mobile with details of a suitable auto loan. It can also give third-party information on car insurance or the whereabouts of e-charging stations run by contracted partners after the deal has been done.
- Joe enters a supermarket to do some grocery shopping. As he is wandering through the aisles, he receives a message from his bank on his mobile about a credit card he could use for future purchases. He can also be notified of a current deal at the supermarket as part of the third-party information that his bank transmits in agreement with the partner.
- Margaret passes by a local outlet of her preferred nationwide pharmacy chain, which has a partnership or merchant agreement with her bank. The bank discovers her location based on GPS data it pre-set for the retail networks of its partners. The financial institution can send Margaret a message that the pharmacy accepts her special payment card linked to her voluntary health insurance fund.
- Michael and Jodie, both avid festival goers and customers of the same commercial bank, are visiting a music festival in Budapest. Once they enter the main stage area, their bank alerts them to pay cashless with the smart wristbands distributed at the event to become eligible for cashback on purchases or special discounts at certain retailers present at the festival.
The above use cases should give you a pretty good idea of why customer insights are getting more and more important for banks when it comes to personalising their campaigns and offerings. Perhaps needless to say, customer insights work best, and high conversion rates can only be achieved if banks have well-designed mobile and online channels for sending out messages and offers.
Stay tuned for more customer insights and use cases in the next few weeks! In the meantime, download our white paper on personalised marketing and sales in digital banking and learn more about how financial institutions can benefit from data-driven customer insights.
