For the past several years the term ‘Customer loyalty’ has become a real trend in almost all spheres where business interacts with a customer: banking, retail, telecommunications, insurance, etc.
Every business understands that the more new customers attracted and old ones retained, the higher is the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). The rush began with the world’s largest banks in the U.S. and Europe and increasingly spread across the globe. Banks’ management was heavily investing the field, while thinking whether this initiative is worth the money spent.
Despite those doubts, the potential of Customer Experience products is enormous. The clue is in the right concept and implementation of the customer experience products.
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Here are some of the examples successfully integrated into the existing banking ecosystems:
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Digital Marketing System
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Personal Finance Management (PFM)
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P2P transfers
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Multichannel approach
So, why can these be valuable for banks? Let`s go through some specifics.
Digital Marketing System
This solution provides bank employees with effective tools for monitoring and management of remote user behavior. Digital marketing system also allows for creating targeted promotional marketing campaigns and managing ad banners for each particular user.
Making the communication more personalized, banks segregate audience by their most basic factors: demographics, income, gender criteria and engagement level. This basic approach and terabytes of useful information allow banks to determine customers’ behavior and create more personalized offers.
Personal Finance Management (PFM)
How many people manage their budgets? How often do they use tools for budget management? And do they really need them?
Most likely few people have time for this, or they do it manually, thus spending lots of time on paper work. PFM is an easily integrated system into any banking solution that can become a gold mine for your customers, giving them an opportunity to automatically manage their budgets.
It helps bank customers to track and categorize their expenses, set up goals and plan savings to reach them. Assuming customers trust their bank, using PFM is a sure-fire way for them to track expenses, while the bank has a great opportunity to provide clients with more personalized and beneficial offerings.
Peer-2-Peer (P2P) Transfers
Transferring money with a tweet or via Facebook messenger is a new reality of payments. In fact, UK Barclays Bank, Japanese Rakuten Bank and a few other pioneers have enabled such an opportunity already.
But what about security concerns? In fact, it is quite secure. Before money is transferred the user makes two-level authentication: FB User ID plus password, and One Time Password (OTP). After that both sender and receiver get SMS and a Facebook notification.
This solution is easily integrated into any banking system and makes payments much simpler and more natural for bank clients.
Multichannel Approach: More Channels, Greater Loyalty, More Money
Communication channels play quite an important role in growing the level of customer loyalty. How banks talk to their clients and where they do it defines the level of customer engagement.
Customers now handle more of their banking interactions via mobile devices, however, personal interaction remains quite valuable for customers. According to a study by Ernst & Young, when it comes to important and costly initiatives customers still prefer to contact brick-and-mortar offices and talk to real people. So why not combine all those channels to interact with customers better?
Go Mobile!
Mobile has become the dominant means for consumers to interact with their banks and a key element in the bid to earn customer loyalty. Customers completed more interactions with their banks via smartphones or tablets than through any other channel.
SMM
Social media has many faces: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and so on. Customers use them when they procrastinate or relax after a long working day and even at night watching cat videos. Why not take a chance and promote bank products there?
Thus, applying the multichannel approach helps banks to address customer needs of any taste at any place. This is critical for effective service, marketing and selling, because customers expect to be able to hop from one channel to another.
Conclusion
I guess you know that it costs five to 10 times more to get a new customer than to sell to a current one. Embracing a comprehensive Customer Loyalty Program is a smart investment into a bank’s stability. Happy (loyal) customers are the valuable business asset that can and should be nurtured.
Alex Arabey, Head of Business Development at Qulix Systems, is a seasoned executive with expertise in a variety of IT services, focused on software development, quality assurance and IT consulting. He is a co-founder of Qulix Systems. Arabey developed the company from a small start-up to the large software company that cooperates with various service providers around the world.
