Chief Architect at Pelatro. Proud to help 30+ telcos/BFSIs offer the finest contextual marketing experience to their 1B+ subscribers.
Chief marketing officers in banks, like their peers elsewhere, are stuck in a tug-of-war between customer satisfaction and ROI.
Gone are the days where customers were happy with only a waiver on late-payment fees. While everyone enjoys freebies, they don’t always translate to increased assets under management or loyal customers. That said, taking an iron-fist approach with profits to please the board can cause an enterprise to fall from grace with customers.
How BFSI Marketing Teams Can Find The Right Balance
Enterprises are aware of this friction. Businesses need profit, and the management is accountable for investors’ money. Customers, on the other hand, expect to be pampered. BFSI enterprises are having trouble finding the right balance. They generally take one of two approaches:
1. Top-Down: With this approach, the business goals and targets are set from above. Sales and marketing divisions are tasked to achieve these goals, and customer experience can take the back seat.
2. Bottom-Up: With this approach, CSAT scores and customer priorities take the front seat. Key result areas are generally tied to sales without accounting for costs. These companies are busy acquiring customers and keeping them happy while profitability takes a back seat.
That said, banks—like most companies—must find ways to balance these two approaches. Here are a few ways to find that balance:
1. Make both “customers interests” and “enterprise objectives” CMO/CSO priorities.
Enterprises should discover the whys behind customers engaging with their brand. They should nudge those customers toward their individual goals using the enterprise’s product offerings and experiences. In doing so, they can’t assume an infinite supply of resources or cash. The products and discounts—including any freebies and vouchers—should be rationed from a pre-allocated budget.
For example, when John visits a bank’s website and clicks a few times around the 8PC_Personal_Loan_1Y product, he shouldn’t be incessantly nudged toward signing up for that product. The bank must first establish a connection with John’s underlying purpose, which could be “short-term credit need.” After that, the bank should work out the case from John’s perspective, taking into consideration his assets and liabilities, products held, credit rating, etc. Finally, the bank can recommend multiple products that help him realize his purpose, which might include “loan at 2% on top of his deposits.”
When recommending the 2% deposit product to John, sales and marketing should be aware that they may be doing so at the expense of possibly recommending the same to Alice, as there should be a rationed quota of products to sell to achieve the desired profit margins.
2. Build hierarchical journey plans.
Based on the above example, banks must build three kinds of customer journey plans: strategic, tactical and operational.
1. Strategic journeys focus on objectives and verifiable targets but do not specifically talk about means to achieve those targets. They always work on aggregate milestones—not in an individual customer’s context—and may cover multiple objectives.
For example, the bank could lay out the quarterly revenue and sales targets with monthly milestones alongside broad annotations:
Month 1: $2 million investments, 25,000 new product sales
Month 2: $1 million investment
Month 3: $3 million investment, 50,000 product sales
Overall goal: Of the 75K new product sales, at least 50% should be upsell and 30% cross-sell.
2. Tactical journeys are defined in the context of individual customers. They don’t carry a complete prescription of all steps from start to end of the journey, and they can have multiple branches along the way. They are defined on a persona and may delegate orchestration to operational journeys, which are described below.
A good tactical journey caters to a single objective from a strategic journey. The bank could, for example, define the five-months journey for first-time-earner persona. This could include monthly guidance milestones to assess progress at the individual level as well as triggering campaigns at stipulated intervals or in response to certain user activity:
Month 1: Ensure no customer complaints and all KYC are complete.
Month 2: Complete zero-party data survey.
Month 3: Recommend two products based on behavioral and contextual data.
Month 4: Check if the customer has signed up for at least one new product since onboarding.
Month 5: Assign a persona based on portfolio value and take a first guess at CLTV.
3. Operational journeys are largely contextual in nature and do not necessarily align with any specific business objectives. They are reactive in order to provide the best customer experience.
A detailed flow diagram, for example, should be based on personalizing engagements by taking into consideration user clicks, activity and inactivity on the banks’s website and app. In doing so, stitch together user actions across channels—such as KYC completed, responded to surveys, etc.—in order to have holistic context for nudging customers.
3. Implement strategies and adopt technology to achieve business goals.
Once journeys are developed, banks should revitalize the marketing and sales activity to align with the hierarchical journeys above. During this process, the CMO and/or CSO team should define top-level strategies alongside enterprise goals and operational constraints.
Technology plays an important role here. For example, domain specialists and analysts punch in the broad outline of tactical journeys, while technology, such as an ML-backed enterprise marketing tool, can take responsibility for curating the actual operational journeys.
Conclusion
To realize large successful business transformations, BFSI enterprises need to maintain equal focus on CSAT and profits. They need to work out a sales and marketing strategy where enterprises serve as a bridge helping customers meet their personal financial goals without taking blind-folded customer-centricity approaches.
Sound journey planning leveraging on strategical, tactical and operational journeys while empowering teams with technology. Only then can companies find the right balance to serve both customers and investors.
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