USING TECHNOLOGY TO GAIN A DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF CUSTOMERS

In this section, we briefly touch on four core components of a customer-centric bank, represented by this diagram.

Customer Database

A data repository is a store of customer data and transactions used by data analysts to help understand different customers’ behaviour, value, segments, and target.

Depending upon the maturity of the bank’s technology, it can be a data warehouse, data pool, data lake or other sub-set of the bank’s overall data. It may be operated in the bank’s data centre or, increasingly, in ‘the Cloud’. The bank’s information technology team build and manage the data repository, ensuring that it is complete and accurate.

We consider this topic further in Customer Management Level II and in the Operations Modules Level I and Level II.

Customer Analytics Platform

Customer analytics software can process customer transaction, interaction, and behavioural data from the bank’s data repository that is used to help decide by using predictive analytics and segmentation to target customers with personalised, relevant, and timely offers.

The software must help customer data analysts perform three main tasks:

• Identify target customers;
• Understand the customers’ needs;
• Identify how the bank’s products or services currently meet the customer’s needs.

Customer Relationship Management System

A customer relationship management (CRM) system is at the core of delivering the bank’s customer-centric experience to improve satisfaction, build trust and loyalty and create sustainable value. It is the foundation of customer-centric Customer Management. It is normally integrated with the bank’s core systems which supply it with information so that it can deliver opportunities to the bank’s omnichannel or multichannel banking platform. Banks can choose to buy a third-party CRM system from one of many vendors, build their own CRM, or customise a vendor system.

Most CRM systems feature a ‘single view’ of the customer or prospect through a profile that is available to customer-facing and back-office employees, including:

• Profile – information about the customer, including their personal details, products held, channels used, marketing contact preferences, value scores, and credit scores;
• Future life-cycle events that the customer has shared, and when they plan to need them;
• In progress, cross-sell, and up-sell opportunities, including outbound campaigns recently communicated, and the status of sales that are in progress, using Next Best Actions (NBAs) to determine the next step;
• Any complaints made recently, or in progress, showing who is dealing with it and its status.

CRM systems can suffer from an adoption and usage problem because of organisations imposing them on their employees as a sales management tool, rather than as a tool that helps them be customer-centric. We discuss how to avoid this problem in Level II.

Omnichannel Banking Platform

Omnichannel Banking or its predecessor, Multichannel Banking, interacts with customers, allowing them to transact and receive offers from the bank. We consider Omnichannel Banking in the next section.