Should banks make ‘personalised customer experiences’ a priority?

By Matthew Biboud Lübeck, VP EMEA at Amperity

A 10% improvement in customer data quality can be linked to a 5% improvement in customer responsiveness, according to Gartner. So in today’s hugely-competitive global marketplace and with the shadow of recession ahead, can financial organisations afford the reputational and bottom line impact caused by siloed data and legacy systems?

Breaking down the data silos in financial services

Financial institutions were built with many data silos for good reason. Banks hold their customers’ most private personal information — not to mention their money. These walls between traditional lines of business bolster security, but they also make it difficult for banks to create personalised experiences that attract customers at scale.

Customers are left to wonder:

• Why am I being sent marketing messages to download an application I already access on a daily basis?
• Why can’t my customer service representative find relevant account information?

In most cases, banks are relying on antiquated tools to facilitate their customer interactions. As such, banking is one of the industries that could most benefit from customer data platforms (CDP) that deliver a unified customer view and data foundation.

However, having been burned in the past by ill-fitting technology upgrades, bank executives are understandably hesitant to make the kinds of sweeping changes needed to bring their customer experiences into the 21st century.

Investing in data key to happy customers

When banks begin creating customer experiences on the foundation of misleading customer profiles, which was the result of poor data architecture they begin churning through inefficient marketing cycles and wasteful spending. This cycle begins by investing valuable time and resources into underdeveloped marketing and analytics data practices to fuel a CDP; the CDP then becomes built on inaccurate data, resulting in ineffective performance and inadequate campaign results, frustrated costumes, and unhappy employees.

Removing silos and bringing down the walls between banks’ traditional lines of business will be critical to improving the customer experience. When banks rely on the architectures and approaches that they used before the digital revolution, they are then limited in their ability to fully leverage customer data. CDPs are designed to simplify the process of ingesting data, identifying customers, and analyzing that information intelligently. That’s difficult to build on top of fragmented, legacy core banking platforms. A CDP can only provide a complete picture of each customer if it can collect data from disparate systems throughout the organisation.

No matter the scale — from boutique businesses to large, well-known brands — the key to success is customer loyalty, which (for the most part) can only be fostered through positive experiences. Customers expect banks to tailor their interactions. With rich, well-informed customer profiles, banks can identify and predict trends in customer behavior and create personalised experiences.

The move from being product-centric, to customer-centric

Historically, banks have taken a product-centric approach to customer loyalty — pushing credit cards or specific types of accounts. To build value, firms need to move toward customer-centricity and concentrate on building brand value, which means taking a holistic view of the customer’s engagement with the brand and focusing on customers’ individual needs and retaining them with personalised experiences. This extra effort will result in happier customers, skyrocketing loyalty, higher engagement, and a more substantial return on investment.

Rethinking the future of banking

The personal banking landscape is shifting and digitising at a pace that is unlikely to slow down. This shift was greatly accelerated by the pandemic, which limited access to physical locations and drove many banks to create new digital touchpoints.

Financial institutions inherently move too slowly and are starting to fall dangerously behind. As a new era of disruptive financial technology emerges, banks will be better positioned if they look at where customer expectations are headed and attempt to meet them instead of simply doing more of the same. The faster these organisations integrate their customer data and put it to use, the more they can satisfy the needs of their customer base, build stronger brand loyalty and separate themselves from the competition.

Matthew Biboud Lübeck, VP EMEA at Amperity

Matthew is the vice president of EMEA where he is responsible for the commercial expansion of Amperity, a leading customer data platform trusted by brands like Reckitt, Under Armour and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Lubeck joined Amperity in 2017 to help launch the company and has served in a number of key roles building sales, customer success, and marketing functions. Matthew established Amperity’s LGBTQ employee resource group (ERG), and is a trusted advisor and customer centricity change agent to the C-suite across leading consumer brands.

Prior to Amperity, Lubeck spent 10 years with global beauty conglomerates Estee Lauder Group and L’Oréal, where he was Group Head of Customer Data Strategy and Analytics, leading 30 brands across luxury, mass and salon professional divisions to better use data & unlock incredible beauty experiences, establishing L’Oreal as an industry leader. He resides in London with his husband and four year old daughter.About Amperity

Amperity is the leading Customer Data Platform provider that helps companies use data to improve marketing performance, build long-term customer loyalty and drive growth. Amperity’s flagship enterprise CDP is used by many of the world’s best-loved brands, such as Alaska Airlines, Endeavour Drinks, Kendra Scott, Lucky Brand, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders FC, Under Armour and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. For more information, please visit amperity.com or follow @Amperity.