How Banks benefit from Qualitatively understanding customer behaviour
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Personalisation, Banking, Customer Experience, Data Science

With almost all the banks joining the digital bandwagon, touch points via omni channels such as ATMs, Internet, Mobile Banking and Business Correspondents have become the main delivery channels for providing banking services. Currently, besides the 16,400-odd brick-and-mortar branches, India’s largest bank, State bank of India, provides banking services through alternate touch-points, including about 57,000 ATMs, 2.4 lakh point-of-sale terminals, around 58,600 customer services points/business correspondents, digital ‘sbiINTOUCH’ branches, internet and mobile banking. This shift to offer a majority of products and services on digital platforms is because of the changing audience and the increase in volumes. According to recent studies, almost 65% of the banks’ target audience is below the age of 35 years, and they rely entirely on technology for most of the transactions.

BANKING FOR THE TECH-SAVVY

Since banks are going to have the young generation as a majority of their customers, they need to create an ecosystem where their products can be actually delivered on digital platforms. The process of reaching out to this audience has to be through digital platforms, but this alone will not suffice, when it comes to making conversions. Banks need highly personalized, relevant and timely offers, which will immediately lead to a conversion, because they address the needs of such a dynamic and digitally enabled audience.

Traditional business paradigms depended on segment-wise targeting of customers, which was a form of qualitative targeting of customers. Digital transformation, however, allows banks to quantitatively understand customer behavior and handle volumes. What’s more, with the available technologies as of this writing, such quantitative and comprehensive customer targeting can be done without making huge investments as banks would need to do in the past. Banks need to leverage available technology to reach its target customer, when the customer needs them the most. Smartphones have led to a connected world where the customers have a lot of power and the ability to achieve the best offerings. Optimal communication should flow both ways, top-down and bottom-up, and focus on actionable insights. As consumers of digital insights, bankers and managers should close the feedback loop, and enrich internal and external data at the source. Transparent, live data analysis and feedback will also enable bank leaders to weigh in constructive challenges to the established beliefs or wisdom, converge towards a clear alignment of purpose, and trigger appropriate actions.

Cadenz — RELEVANT, CONTEXTUAL AND SCALABLE

Cadenz contextual marketing engine powered by RoboticDataScience features real-time links to all data sources that feed from information at the bank and external software services and data sources. Cadenz is a robotic data scientist for marketeers, which leverages comprehensive customer models and advanced machine learning at scale, to deliver real time, relevant and contextual offers to prospective customers. It is therefore a true enabler of scale and precision in customer targeting.

Bankers and specialists will have interactive access to live information through smart, intuitive queries articulated in natural language that have the acumen to pre-fill, preview, and proactively suggest relevant data. A comprehensive view of customer information and activity, to include all interactions and transactions across digital and physical channels, will yield deeper and more meaningful insights.

As these digital insights flash a universal version of the truth to the bank and its customers, collective alignment will spark new business opportunities. For instance, if a customer has shopped for new laptop, offers relevant to the customer on accessories for the laptop, can be sent to the customer based on the customer’s physical and digital contexts. This approach has shown a huge amount of success, and leads to more direct conversions and is in a sense, a win-win situation for the banks and customers. Banks have shifted from product-centric to customer-centric to deliver the maximum value to customers and providing them with tailor-made products & services.

Personalization is key in this new era of banking. Customer journey and customer engagement have changed significantly, and have pivoted around the digital and data revolutions. Innovations in these areas have brought new ways of driving efficiency in banks, while simultaneously allowing banks to create better customer experiences through best pricing, speed and convenience.

About the author:

Rangarajan Vasudevan, CEO of TheDataTeam, is an applied data science professional with extensive consulting experience on massive scale data across industries.