A second chance: Re-engage financial services customers using intelligence, not just their last interaction

When Financial Service customers go to market to engage in a new product or service, they are no longer loyal to a single provider and often apply for the same service across multiple brands. In fact, according to the Accenture Banking Consumer Study, 82% of consumers aged 18-24 acquired a financial services product from a new provider in the past 12 months. Often, the easiest application process, or the one with the ‘fastest time to yes’, or first to approve the application, wins the customer.

Equally, financial application processes require a significant amount of data entry, across multiple steps and often require the customer to share supporting documents or details that require the customer to break the process while they source the required material.

It is for these reasons, now more than ever, that financial brands must deliver intelligent re-engagement campaign journeys fused with digital capability that have evolved far beyond the old-school “abandoned application” message. Bombarding customers with a singular “have you forgotten something” message that only looks at their last action can be irritating and irrelevant.

Instead, financial brands must utilise data to understand where in the application process the customer abandoned, and more importantly why. With this information, they must craft a personalised and valuable “invitation” to re-engage and deliver this in a timely series of communications that drive the customer back to the exact point they left off, for a seamless and easy application continuation.

For the customer, every brand interaction must leave them feeling empowered and confident before they’ll consider selecting that brand as a financial services provider – taking up a home loan, achieving peace of mind with an insurance offer, or selecting a better savings account or investment rate.

From one-click applications to omnichannel message delivery that’s designed to bring customers back to their application processes, intuitive customer experience solutions have never been more necessary. And all with the goal of delivering proactive and relevant experiences that drive customer re-engagement.

Unifying data to bring a holistic view of customers to life

Making sense of in-the-moment interactions by utilising real-time data from multiple sources and channels and then securely streamlining them with intelligent customer analytics tools that use AI and Machine Learning (ML) is vital in delivering an intelligent re-engagement experience.

These tools allow your business to gather and analyse data from every customer touchpoint across marketing, product, and service channels, including web, mobile, app, email, CRM, loyalty, customer surveys, and in-store interactions. This provides a holistic view to help first understand why a customer may have abandoned their application, and then deliver personalised one-to-one experiences at a time when it's most useful to the customer in their journey.

Furthermore, these communications must be private, secure and delivered on the customers terms, in the channels they choose to interact with the brand and done so in a manner that is congruent with regulatory requirements and a consumer’s privacy sensitivity demands.

For existing customers applying to secondary product, the application process should be much more seamless, with the FSI brand integrating the pre-existing known customer data to “pre-fill” the application process and only request additional information that is required, streamlining and simplifying the entire application workflow.

Finally, as financial services customers often apply to multiple competing brands, re-engagement journeys must be timely, triggered in-the-moment the customer abandons, using real-time data, in order to re-engage before the customer begins an application with a competitive brand.

Meaningful re-engagement: A case for streamlined home loan re-engagement

Let's say an existing customer engages with a home loan calculator on a retail bank’s website to estimate the monthly repayments for a house with a value of $680,000. They begin to apply online, however on step 4 of 6 they drop off from the application process.

By using this one interaction, a traditional abandoned application campaign would send a reminder email to remind the customer to complete the application form, or further promote the loan with an offer like a special interest rate and repayment option. Further follow-up might include digital advertising on platforms the customer is on, repeating the same one-size-fits-all messaging. All to push the customer to sign up for a loan.

Whereas, by looking at a unified customer profile and incorporating first-party data, this will uncover that the customer is 31 years old, earns $120,000 a year, and is building a strong credit history with regular payments on a small car loan and is likely purchasing their first home.

Augmenting this customer profile data, with online behavioural data, we can see the customer dropped off on step 4, when attempting to complete their tax number on the application form.

By quickly and accurately unifying data and behavioural insights to create a real-time customer profile, the bank can make an informed decision – this customer is a high priority application and is likely having trouble finding their tax file number while applying for their first home loan.

With this information, a personally tailored series of communications containing instructions on the best place to retrieve their tax number in their region, and benefits for first time home buyers along with a one-click ‘resume application’ link can greatly encourage and re-engage this customer.

Furthermore, a high priority re-engagement journey can be triggered, triggering a priority call out from a local centre, high spend online advertising, and a real-time email – all of which contain personalised assistance information.

Enhancing a lifelong banking relationship

To meet rising customer expectations at every touchpoint of a customer's journey and answer to their needs in real-time, retail banks, insurers, and asset managers across the industry must be able to make sense of the available data to better understand their customers and filter the interactions that help create intuitive engagements and experiences.

A real-time, unified customer view comprised of behavioural, attribute and preference data that looks beyond a customer’s last action means financial service brands can deliver personalised, intelligent reengagement journeys containing personalised experiences with the right message, at the right time, greatly increasing the propensity for re-engaging valued product applications and reduce competitive churn.

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