How much do you know about your internal analytics team? If you’re an executive, you may have valuable insight, but what about the managers and universal bankers at your various branches? How much does your app development team understand the day-to-day experience of a teller? While these groups have somewhat disconnected responsibilities, they all work toward the same goal of better serving customers and creating meaningful partnerships. As such, if you can get these diverse groups to interact with each other more, you can reveal learnings and opportunities otherwise unseen in your financial institution.
Understanding the Influence Separates Services Have on Each Other
Organizations have to interact with each other to figure out how their separate tasks and responsibilities come together to help the customer. Take the example of the dynamic between an app glitch and the customer service department. While customer service may be trained to handle a wide variety of tasks, handling work-arounds for tech issue such as mobile glitches could be out of their scope. Therefore, when a confused customer reaches out to customer service regarding a glitch, they may additionally report a poor customer service experience if they aren’t able to get their questions resolved.
Examples such as this exist across a variety of departments and teams within a financial institution. Marketing materials affect customer expectations when they interact with branch representatives. Data analytics make product recommendations to customers, such as new accounts or loans, which they may apply to online. Customers are dynamic, and tend to think about their experiences more holistically than organizations. Seeing things through their lenses helps financial institutions provide higher value and better service.
Internal Access to Comprehensive Customer Information
Part of breaking down department silos requires educating employees about other departments. However, while learning about other people’s work is important and valuable, understanding the way their work connects to the customer is vital. Universal bankers should be given access to customer information that is succinct and useful to their communication. This can combine information impacted by various departments, such as the customer’s omni-channel activity (digital), any loans they have and notes from past customer interactions (customer service). When universal bankers apply this correctly, they can enhance the customer experience through better service.
This type of customer data aggregation also helps the organization as a whole better understand the customer journey. In a dashboard a universal banker accesses, they should (hopefully) be able to understand the customer journey up until that point, and document an touchpoints that haven’t been accounted for. In this scenario, the old school approach of asking a customer how they learned about a service or what information gathering they did can provide valuable insight and shape the way the organization as a whole looks at the customer journey.
Creating Selling Opportunities
Encouraging different groups within your organization to interact can lead to the revelation of selling opportunities. Consider an example of a digital advertising team interacting with universal bankers. The digital team may focus on various analytics to predict customer needs based on their financial situations. However, by interacting with universal bankers, they can gain more context about the statistics along with useful framing of solutions for customers.
The reality of financial services is that it serves a diverse set of needs. One on hand, customers themselves are diverse individuals with various needs, preferences and opinions. More importantly, the individual customer has a diversity of family dynamics, interests, and multifaceted financial factors that play into their overall well-being. This puts a huge responsibility on financial institutions: to try to understand and serve the whole person, rather than focusing on an individual need. By getting analytics, universal bankers, advertisers, loan experts and compliance professions to interact, financial institutions can begin to put this puzzle together and customize the way they sell to, and interact with, their customer base.
