Credit unions and community banks stand out on service. The personal, one on one service they offer their customers. For consumers, small businesses, and local developers, this high-touch experience is missing at larger regional and national players.
They provide repeatable and efficient but often sterile experiences.
Having that well honed in branch experience at all touchpoints is top of mind for leading bankers. Almost all worry about the average age of their customer. The demographic gap between customers and served communities grows wider every year. Staying relevant requires more innovation. It also requires more novel approaches to getting and keeping customers.
This is the first of four posts on the winning competencies for community institutions. We will cover in-depth three key areas:
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Data collection and governance: To offer personalized communications, relevant offers, and the targeted journey customers expect, relies on data. It begins with your ability to collect and manage data. This effort is more than compliance. Much more. Not mishandling data is not the same thing as ensuring it is leveraged in the right place, in the right form, by the right people, at the right time.
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Aggregation: To paint a clear picture of your customers’ POV and experience requires more than just the current transaction. You must be able to bring all of the relevant information you have, often siloed in different departments and software. This enables the insight to know the most relevant offer or message in any situation.
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Activation: Once you know the best next action, you must be able to take it. Promptly, with as little friction or effort as necessary. Knowing the most relevant context and channel for an individual customer is only useful if you can act on it. A closed loop between your data, decision, and customer touch point is essential. You may be able to quickly reach out with an email, mailer, or SMS message to a potential opportunity. But if their response sits in a queue for days waiting on a manual response or, worse, goes into a black hole, you’re not only lowering your effectiveness but damaging your reputation.
It would be easy to point at a list of point products to add to your ever-growing marketing technology stack. In this series, we’re going to look into the success criteria for each area and help you develop your individual strategy so that you will be able to:
- Align your marketing and customer success efforts with your strategy and not the strategy of your competitors
- Clearly evaluate your vendors and hold them accountable for what’s vital to your success
- Ensure your customer and their experience with you is front and center of outcomes
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