The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Personalization Framework helps banks understand what they need to do so that their customers perceive the banking service as personal. The model describes several main elements from the perspective of the customer. The branch network should be a critical instrument in providing this personalized customer experience. This blog introduces the BCG Personalization Framework and shows branch networks how to personalize customer journeys based on the framework.
Empowering the customer
Empowering customers means using information about the customer to help them achieve a goal and providing them with a great experience in the channel they choose when they need it.
Supporting customers to achieve their goals may involve:
Education
Education is used to generate awareness of / interest in a banking product. By helping customers comprehend financial concepts, market trends, and products relevant to their needs, banks can build trust and establish themselves as reliable experts.
Inspiration
Inspiration occurs when a customer discovers a desirable opportunity (trigger) that aligns closely with their needs and circumstances (resonance). Inspiration motivates action. Therefore, the primary goal of in-branch consulting should be to highlight and discuss topics that deliver value to the customer.
Continuous Engagement
Engagement is an ongoing activity, not something that happens only when the bank wants to sell. Consistent engagement enables banks to gather valuable customer insights and tailor their offers with precision, enhancing relevance and effectiveness.
Access
Frictionless customer journeys are the means of letting customers access products and services that make their lives easier. This involves making sure that customers get easy access to their consultants and to services.
To achieve the above objectives, banks should consider the following when empowering customers:
- Employee Selection, Training & Culture Shift: A critical component of digital transformation is ensuring that employees are comfortable with new technologies. Staff must be trained not just in using new tools but also in understanding their role in delivering excellent customer experience. Shifting the culture from transaction-focused to customer-experience-focused is essential for success.
- Making the branch an “education center”: Educate customers about financial consciousness, markets, products, and services and teach them how they should bank. By educating customers, they become aware and interested in financial solutions and bank consultants can position themselves as trusted advisors.
- Making the branch an “inspiration center” focused on providing great experiences. Gen Z will not visit branches if it is not offering inspiration, excitement and value.
- Active listening and empathy towards the customer go a long way in earning trust.
- Simplifying processes and products. It may require working closely with regulators. Complex products alienate customers and are difficult to work with.
- Measuring branch waiting and service times and acting on any repeat deviation from expected. Measure consultant workload and success rates.
- Ensuring appointment booking is easy for customers for services where consultation is preferred. Customers should be discouraged from visiting the branch for services that are better provided on other channels. Appointment booking should be made available via mobile app, contact center, webpage, chatbot and more. Appointment booking should be possible for a specific consultant, making the booking directly in the consultant’s calendar. An AI-assisted booking can reduce the complexity of booking.
- Employing welcome advisors. They are efficient in greeting, directing, and educating customers when they arrive to the branch. They can manage expectations and thus avoid customer dissatisfaction resulting in walkaways. There are experiments of using AI-based or remote welcome advisors. Either way, reducing friction and making the customer feel safe and important are key to winning loyalty.
Knowing the customer
Rule of knowing the customer: the more engaged the customer is, the more data the bank can collect about them. Direct customer relationships offer a superb opportunity to collect data about the customer: who they are, what they want, where they are on their journey and how they have engaged with personalized content.
Zero-party data is what customers directly tell the bank about themselves. These data are safe from a GDPR perspective as they have customers’ consent. Zero-party data is well augmented by first-party data, which comes from transactional data created by recording actions the customer takes-browsing different pages on the website or executing a banking transaction.
To build competitive advantage, banks need to steadily accumulate engagement data: whether customer opens e-mails, how much time they spend on different parts of the website or app, what channels they engage with, and when.
To gather valuable data banks should consider:
- Ensuring personal consultants listen to and collect data about customer intent, motivation, background, life situation, banking communication preferences, technical and financial maturity, etc.
- Extracting detailed customer data via pre-consultation surveys.
- Tracking web and app behavior and registering type, and frequency of channel engagement via all possible means.
Reaching the customer
Reaching the customer has at least three variables: when, where and with what content. To decide, the bank needs to build the engagement ladder and the next-best-action map.
The engagement ladder is the sequence of customer engagement levels starting from an inactive customer up to someone who is a brand advocate or in other words, a fan. Banks should push customers up the ladder until they become loyal brand advocates. Brand advocates have multi-product relationships and are less susceptible to price and occasional service quality fluctuations. Each bank will define its engagement ladder levels and corresponding actions.
The next-best-action is about reaching customers on certain channels and providing content that matches the customer’s current state, including their position on the engagement ladder. Ways of reaching out should vary for an inactive or a single product customer or if a customer is undergoing a complaint process.
The formats of reaching the customers are changing. Banks experiment with new technology, including:
- Digital Kiosks for Self-Service
Use self-service kiosks within the branch for activities like cash deposits, withdrawals, or document uploads.
- Video Conferencing with Specialists
For complex services, allow customers to speak with remote specialists via video call, providing expertise without requiring specialists to be on-site.
- Co-Browsing & Remote Assistance
Enable bank staff to provide real-time assistance through co-browsing, guiding customers through online services and applications remotely.
- Branch as a personal consulting center
Our survey and publicly available research also show that people still like to have personal advisors whom they can call or meet in case of questions. Especially, in the case of complex problems or purchasing complex banking products.
- Branch as a community center
More and more banks turn their branches into community places: cafes, meeting points, startup spaces, business collaboration places or event locations. This is necessary as the volume of customers is decreasing due to some transactional services being discontinued in branches.
Delighting the customer
Delighting the customer is not a one-time effort; it is the outcome of continuous learning and a relentless cycle of experimentation, measurement, and refinement. This marks a drift from „send and forget” campaigns to the personalized and consistent „next best action orchestration”.
A consistently delighted customer becomes a fan with multiple ties to the bank. If customer engagement is continuous, so will the data points from these interactions. Data will then be used to build the next best action leading to stronger customer attachment.
An offer pushed forward by the bank will convert if it is:
- Relevant – offering the right product/content, via the right channel, at the right time.
- Appealing – resulting in competitive advantage, and emotional attachment.
- Easy to get – providing a frictionless customer journey.
Summary
To excel in personalization, traditional banks must undergo a massive transformation: transitioning from a product-focused organization to a services relationship organization, where everything is centered around providing personal and superior customer service. Personalization is not a sales approach but a concept that expands across the whole customer journey, from brand awareness to post-sales service. It is about making customers’ lives easier and delighting them consistently on a scale.
If you’re interested in how Linistry can help you take a decisive step ahead with a small investment in personalized customer experience, watch our webinar here: Webinar: Winning business in banking with data-driven hyper-personalization