Consumers are everywhere – on their phones, on tablets, on social media, in your stores, calling into support centers, the list goes on. And financial service brands are ramping up their omni-channel strategies to deliver the most seamless customer experience. Customers expect the ability to jump from one platform to another without any interruption, and brands are beginning to level up.
Brands know they must focus on the customer lifecycle and experience. This includes focusing on closing the gap between martech and data, to break down data silos and deliver a unified customer experience.
Below, we’ve listed four strategies financial service brands can enact to enhance their omni-channel experience.
1. Communicate across platforms
This one should be an easy one, but many brands forget to truly initiate this strategy. It’s not enough to simply have your platforms interact so that your customers can open their banking app and transfer some money and then, moments later, see that same transfer on their online banking site. Financial service brands must have contextual conversations across platforms.
Consider a customer who recently had a conversation about a service issue with someone in your call center. A few days go by and that issue is still not resolved. If they choose to open their app to try another route, they won’t want to start all over again with their customer support issue.
But an integrated CXM platform would be able to offer an integrated experience. A call center conversation could log notes into a customer profile in which data silos are deconstructed. Those notes would transfer to any other customer support network they look after, whether that is a chatbot in your app or your customer support teams that work specific to a different channel, such as app or social.
By communicating across channels, you’ll keep the conversation going and not lose customers as they’re nurtured across the customer journey. But that’s if you can send them the right messages in the first place.
2. Deliver lasting messages anywhere
In order to keep the conversation going across channels, you’ll have to make sure that you’re sending the right messages in the first place.
Once data silos are broken down, brands must work to ensure that all the contextual data that feeds marketing, customer success, and other teams, work together to create the most relevant experiences regardless of channel.
Data is meaningless unless it’s providing context to the customer profile that can be leveraged to enrich their customer experience.
3. Remain top of mind
It goes without saying that remaining top of mind is hard in these times of short attention spans as consumers move on to the next thing. Brands must find a way to stay at the forefront of consumers’ mindsets.
Consider this:
Your customer is browsing your website and adding products to their cart. A myriad of distractions could result in them abandoning their cart.
A web push notification after a few hours of inactivity to remind them to complete their purchase, a push notification, a social media ad with those items in the creative, there are multiple options for brands to recapture attention that hopefully lead to conversion
4. Nurture your consumers, faster
How many campaigns does it take your average customer to make a purchase? Sometimes it can be one attention-grabbing email, sometimes it takes five or more touches to complete a purchase. Your omni-channel strategy must manage the entire customer journey as one holistic experience instead of segmented, individual nurture campaigns.
Let’s say a customer will take five campaigns to convince them to convert on what you’re promoting – let’s say a new credit card application.
To nurture your customer into enrolling in this credit card, brands could send, as an example, a social media post, an ad, a push notification, an email, followed by a text message to drive the message home that they would benefit from the card. Information could start broad at first, providing deeper context based on how the consumer is engaging. These separate channels working as a singular journey would help the brand understand each individual consumer’s channel or message of choice to enrich the customer experience, both leading to faster and more effective nurture streams.
Financial service brands are getting up to par with their omni-channel experience. Want to learn how we can help financial services brands enrich their customer experience? Contact us today.