A digital customer journey gives us the opportunity to adapt and improve much more rapidly than before. Financial strength and security is a key brand value in financial services but being easy to do business with as well as innovative is quickly catching up - By Eoin Lyons
A 2015 survey of North American marketers showed that first-party data - i.e. information collected personally from one’s own customers - gives the best insights. I don’t think that it is intentionally ironic that this survey was conducted by a third-party specialist marketing agency!
An automated customer journey will deliver rapid feedback and in ways not previously seen. An online illustration for life insurance might have 20 questions about health and lifestyle. You might find customers stop and don’t proceed at a particular question or page more than any other. That is useful feedback with potentially actionable insights allowing you to improve the process and bring more customers to completion at that stage of the journey.
Any eCommerce business worth its salt is already learning, adapting and offering “next best actions” to customers based on such feedback. More and more subtle behaviours will be observed as more business is done online. A pointer hovering at a particular location on the screen for a certain amount of time will probably tell you something useful about that customer. That insight, combined with other patterns of behaviour, will allow you to offer an appropriate next best action.
There are complex data protection issues raised by this which are only just starting to be understood. I’ll discuss that in a later post. Today my interest is in how the financial services industry will compete in this area.
The trend in the this sector is for customers to move online and self-serve. Some products are moving at a faster pace than others. In all cases a digital customer journey gives us the opportunity to adapt and improve much more rapidly than before. Financial strength and security is a key brand value in financial services but being easy to do business with as well as innovative is quickly catching up.
Those firms who are delivering products and services on a platform where insights can be quickly acted upon to make the customer journey more relevant will be more competitive.
In other words, those who get reliable and timely information “straight from the horse’s mouth”, will keep their customers happy.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/straight-from-horses-mouth-eoin-lyons/