Banking is not something we do for fun. Even as adults, we still find ourselves stuck in the world of numbers and compound interests. Many people are not aware of standard banking terms or what they mean.
This is what life is like for many people, if not most.
According to Accenture, 79% of the consumers define their banking relationship as transactional. For banking institutions, this means that their customers may not have much idea of their offerings, which makes customer engagement in banking crucial.
As the banking industry gears up to robustly adopt digital solutions, the focus on customer engagement in banking also needs to improve dramatically. When done right, customer engagement in banking has the potential of becoming a pillar that holds up your relationship with the customers.
This article covers proven ways to enhance customer engagement in banking, which will help you provide a superior experience with every interaction you have with your customers at multiple touchpoints.
Seamless Technology Adoption and Onboarding
Delivering a frictionless digital onboarding by banks is essential. It serves as the first touchpoint for the customers and sets the tone for all future interactions customers have with the bank.
Provide a step-by-step guide to help them use all the latest technological features you have to offer. You can use a third-party customer engagement platform for assistance in this area. A great example is an explainer video that can walk your customers through the entire process of downloading and setting up the mobile app on their phones.
Digitally Onboarding a customer will become a critical requirement for banks and financial institutions in the future to align and meet the expectations of the millennials and the digital-first customer.
Personalize Interactions with Data
Today, every customer has grown accustomed to well-targeted and personalized communications for pretty much every product/service they need.
Data is one of the most powerful customer engagement tools in banking. Take the help of data to offer customized services and personalize every single interaction. There are different ways to carry out personalization, which can be achieved through the use of many touchpoints, integrating them into a single experience, and perhaps taking advantage of an omnichannel approach, which leads the users to live a fully immersive experience that is tailored around them.
Data and analytics help you understand who your customers are, where they are coming from, and their financial aspirations. For example, is your customer using the autopay feature to pay the bills? Or, is your customer managing the credit card properly? By monitoring the customer journey on all of your digital platforms, you will be in a position to understand your customer’s behavioral patterns and financial habits.
Invest and do more with Mobile Banking
Mobile banking is no longer an “extra” but an essential service. While visits to physical branches may be declining, people interact with their bank even more now that it’s at their fingertips. Furthermore, your customers don’t just want the option of banking on the go. They expect a mobile banking experience that is easy to use and offers convenient functions.
Therefore, banks need to increase the number of customers using their mobile apps — and increase the value of every app visit.
Banks can also take what they can learn from their users’ mobile interactions — interests, preferences, and intentions — and stream them into the back end of other systems to create new dimensions to understand customers.
For instance, it’s easy to collate exactly what behaviors are most popular on an app, and you can then reward those behaviors further and increase customer loyalty. This, in turn, drives growth and fuels further customer interaction in a virtuous circle as engagement furthers growth and growth furthers engagement.
Leverage Gamification to drive engagement
Gamification challenges e-banking to develop and implement new features, namely the elements and characteristics frequently associated with online games (e.g., easy process, attractive design, points, leaderboards, rewards, etc.).
For instance, banks can launch apps with tutorials and explanations on paying taxes and online transactions. They can present this in the form of a challenge so that the customers will earn points for the completed tasks.
Another solution is that the app users can get points for online transactions and later exchange them for different goods offered by a bank.
Although the notion of “gamification in banking” is relevantly new, the solution has proven to be a successful tool in driving new customers and retaining the current ones.
We at Upshot.ai, empower banking and financial institutions with innovative solutions to enhance customer experience and drive growth.
Get in touch with our experts and find out more about ways your company can apply gamification and how your business can start benefiting from this technology today!
Keep the conversation going with In-app messages and Push notifications
In-app messaging and push notification offers genuine conversations that are simple and easy to use for the consumer.
This give and take offered by in-app messaging and push notification means that customers get information on the specific issues that are most important to them. Banks can also use it to keep the users up to date about account privileges, financial offers, new product launches, app updates and upgrades, and noteworthy announcements.
Thanks to data collection tools, you can even personalize responses that speak to their needs and to who they are, which means the bank can know their users’ real-time behavior and form a detailed customer profile.
Coupled with behavioral segmentation and personalization, these two channels i.e In-app messages and push notifications, work brilliantly in keeping the users warmly engaged without making you appear too pushy.
Final Takeaway
The modern banking consumer is on a million different channels for a total omnichannel experience. Banks must optimize customer experiences across those channels and engage with them to generate brand loyalty and growth.
Banks must find ways to analyze huge amounts of data to personalize the experience for their consumers and invest in the support systems and communication process that will allow them to have the continued dialogue they need to build long-term, profitable customer relationships.
