ENGAGING SPECIFIC CUSTOMERS OR SEGMENTS Copy

Deploying resources

Most retail banks have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of customers. How can it engage with all its customers in a meaningful, personalised, and relevant way?

It can’t. Often it doesn’t have the resources, the skills and capabilities or the processes or technology. It must decide which groups or segments of customers or prospects to engage to gain, grow or keep. It does this by understanding its customers, as we have discussed in previous chapters.

The bank will consider how it might develop a strategy for each of the segments it wants to gain, grow, or keep by improving their loyalty and the average return per customer.

Needs, Life-cycle and Events

• Needs are customer jobs to be done, dreams to be satisfied, or problems to be solved.
• Lifecycle is understanding how customers travel though life: education, getting a job, being made redundant, starting a family, children leaving home, and retiring. It used to be linear, but modern life is far from straightforward. This topic is discussed in more detail in Customer Management Level II.
• Events is information that customers have told you that will happen in their lives where you can help get a job done, satisfy a dream or solve a problem, and are specific individual life-cycle events, such as planning to retire.

Improving Customer Satisfaction through Personalised and Timely Offers

There are two types of targeted campaigns that achieve the above aim.

Outbound – includes traditional paper-based letters and brochures, email, SMS text message with a link to a product page on the bank’s website or a call from a contact centre.

Inbound – when the customer interacts with the bank through a channel, such as using a banking app,  Internet banking, or visiting a branch to find out about a product. This can include generic product focused banner adverts and on-screen messages and personalised and relevant Next Best Actions (NBAs). They may follow-up outbound campaigns.

Banks must Consider Several Factors

A bank must consider whether the campaign is consistent with the customer’s proposition, what products that they currently hold and the product hierarchy, what segment they are in, customer’s contact and channel preferences, their value, the tone of voice to be used.

These are discussed in more detail in Customer Management Level II.

Integrated Contact Management

To manage, analyse the result and report on outcome of the contact with the customer, the bank must be able to track every step of the interaction, closing the loop without loss of data.

It must also learn from every interaction to improve the customer experience, its performance, and its products. It does this through a model such as the one below.