5 Ways Retail Banks Can Leverage Customer Data Effectively

Collecting data with no way to use it is like learning to drive without a car; it just doesn’t make sense. For retail banks, and most organizations, collecting data is only half the battle in the world of customer experience. Whether it be transactional surveys, online reviews, or a market research report about your customers, the data you collect needs to not just be analyzed, it needs to serve as a road map of future business decisions.

Using customer data to influence your business decisions will lead to a more streamlined, profitable banking organization that actively engages customers. Don’t just take our word for it, research shows that companies who adopt data-driven marketing are six times more likely to be profitable year-over-year. 

Every day, your customers produce data across a vast amount of touchpoints, whether that’s on your banking app, in your call center, or across any of your other channels. That data is there to help you understand their behavior, their needs, and even predict their future behavior. But, in order to do this, that data has to be in a centralized platform in order to be readily available for evaluation and future strategic planning. 

Once you have this data at your disposal, there are a number of ways you can use it to improve experiences for your banking customers. With so many ways to use customer data, we have picked 5 strategies for retail banks looking to leverage customer data.

5 Strategies for Retail Banks to Get the Most Out of Their Customer Data

Strategy #1: Capture Meaningful Data

You need to capture data that is meaningful to your bank, and that is related to the current objectives you have in mind. If you run a local credit union, there’s no point in asking your members what their favorite flavor of ice cream is. This is a more extreme example, but you get what we’re trying to say. If your goal is to improve the digital experience, you don’t want to ask about the in-branch experience.

By designing an experience program with your end goals in mind, you’ll know what data you need to collect to achieve those goals. Knowing what data you need to collect will outline what questions you need to be asking your customers in order to get that data, and consequently, achieve those goals you originally planned. 

Retail banks already have access to critical customer data. Age, gender, geographic location, and spending habits are data points that can already be leveraged. But, mixing these data points with structured feedback via social media or surveys, as well as meaningful data captured in order to achieve a desired goal, will allow retail banks to get a holistic view of their customer and their customer experience. 

Wondering how you can refine your data-gathering strategy to leverage the right listening methods at the right time? Check out this quick article.

Strategy #2: Master Omnichannel Experiences

Retail banking customers today demand consistent, intuitive omnichannel experiences that are personalized and accessible anywhere. However, most retail banks fail to deliver this and are unable to monetize customer data through their products and services. 

Research shows that online banking has increased by 23% and mobile banking has increased by 30%. This means that customers are stepping away from the teller, and toward the chat assistant on your bank’s website or app. Although the medium is changing, customers still expect the same experience that they received inside a branch to be consistent with the one they receive online. 

By mastering omnichannel experiences, you will set yourself apart from the competition, and keep your customers coming back time and time again, whether they are on their phone, computer, or visiting you in person. 

Strategy #3: Break Down Data Silos

Breaking down data silos and combining data from multiple sources across a banking organization can increase efficiency and control in a fast-changing and demanding environment. 

Retail banks receive data from multiple sources and departments. If these various pathways of customer data do not converge on a central location, retail banks risk having a distorted view of the customer experience and risk an increase in customer churn. 

By having all of your customer data in one place, you can easily access multiple data points from different locations across your organization. This will provide you with a 360-degree view of a customer’s activity and engagement with the bank and will allow you to make well-informed decisions with your customer base in mind. 

Strategy #4: Collect Data Across the Entire Customer Journey

Retail banks can achieve their goals by tracking the customer journey, and finding areas of improvement. When doing this, it is important to track the entire customer journey. While a traditional bank may track the customer journey as opening an account, transactions, and borrowing, you should be tracking the steps it took for a customer to open an account, such as their first visit to your website. Where other banks track transactions, you should track specific spending habits in order to know your customer and personalize their experience. 

Retail banks must keep the customers at the heart of the journey by tracking key moments in their experiences and improve these moments in the customer journey.

Strategy #5: Analyze Behavior and Emotions

Throughout the data collection process, it is important to remember that your customers cannot be reduced to just a mix of data points. Your customers have emotions, and they make emotional decisions. Without cultivating positive emotions in customers, banks risk being forgotten. You need to know your customers behavior, so that you know where to focus to make the biggest impact on them. 

According to J.D. Power, Customers in the retail banking industry are not happy with the level of personalization they experience in their transactions—but the customer feedback you collect could help change all that! Designing experiences to create positive emotions increases customer lifetime value and reduces risk of customer churn. Learn how retail banking giant Virgin Money analyzed customer emotions across the journey to create specific improvements and positive emotions in this video!

Leveraging Your Customer Data

Your customer data should be one of your biggest assets. It can be used to solve problems, and make decisions with your customers’ needs in mind. But remember, data alone cannot make those changes—you need to make sure you’re leveraging the right technology, taking the advice of experts, and taking action based on the insights you derive from that data. Put in place a framework that ensures that type of continuous experience improvement, and you are sure to attract new customers, retain old ones, and, ultimately, make your customer experience program a key part of your retail bank’s success!

For more information about how retail banks can leverage customer data effectively, checkout this white paper on how to stand out in your industry!

How Quick Service Restaurants Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Every Department

In our last blog about creating an excellent food service customer experience (CX), we talked about how vital customer reviews are to growing your business (and how your customer experience plays a pivotal role in making sure your reviews are positive). 

It’s clear the customer experience is vital for any food services business, and in our decades of experience working with the world’s best brands, we’ve noticed a common challenge: food service customer experience data is often very siloed from department to department, and team to team. Too often customer experience data isn’t being shared or leveraged across departments, even though there is tremendous value for all departments to make business decisions that either cut costs, help to acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and grow the lifetime value of your loyalists. 

In order to win in a competitive market, all departments need to have a sense of ownership in the customer experience. Every team should be able to explain how their role connects to the customer and to the customer feedback, from the front line to operations. We are going to walk through how different departments can benefit from customer feedback and some examples of how it can be used. 

How Five Different Departments Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Food Services Brands

#1: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Operations

In food services, operations managers are typically concerned with hiring and training employees, coordinating work and schedules, developing working relationships with front and back of house staff, and more. Where customer feedback can help with these responsibilities is by promoting an internal culture that puts the customer at the center. Your employees need to be on board with what you are trying to accomplish with your customer experience efforts from day one, and giving them a window into the end customer is one way to do that! 

Building employee buy-in comes from rallying around the employees. This can be done in a variety of ways. One example of this comes from an InMoment quick service restaurant (QSR) customer who has had great success by building an employee Facebook group to share success stories. This keeps employees engaged and aware of what is happening within the company, and helps to inspire them to create great experiences. 

Another example of how to rally employees around the customer experience is by using a solution like Moments. Moments from InMoment helps you to build a meaningful experience culture and inspire employee advocates for your program. Moments is available in an app, allowing you to surface valuable comments in an Instagram-like feed, so your teams have access to customer feedback anywhere they go! 

Additionally, customer feedback also helps food services brands to ensure quality customer experiences at scale and across locations. For example, a globally popular restaurant chain and InMoment customer previously used mystery shopping techniques to gather data before partnering with InMoment. Mystery shopping gave this business very limited data that they only had access to once a month. With InMoment, they are able to show stores how they rank on key metrics such as friendliness and value. And, as this program has progressed, they are able to draw correlations between stores that are performing well in the system and their sales. 

#2: Leveraging Customer Feedback in H.R. 

The best way to use customer feedback in human resources is to highlight employee success. Research shows that 79% of employees who quit their jobs say that they didn’t feel appreciated. Knowing this, an InMoment QSR customer built an employee recognition page on their company intranet to recognize employees! This page quickly became the most-read page on their website. 

By highlighting employee success, you will be able to reduce turnover, which means not having to spend the money on training new employees. Our QSR clients say training a new employee can cost them an average of $1900! By reducing turnover, you’ll not only experience significant cost savings, but you’ll also have more tenured employees that create the best customer experiences. And we don’t know about you, but lower costs and better experiences sounds like a whole lot of value to us!

#3: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Finance

Using customer feedback in finance may sound obscure, but it may be one of the best ways to help your business succeed. By listening and digesting customer feedback, you’ll be able to recover at-risk revenue. You can identify where you may be losing customers and reach out to recover them. 

It will also help you build a high sales potential. Forrester research shows that customers who receive positive experiences are 2.7xs more likely to spend more with a brand. By curating a positive experience, customers will be more inclined to revisit and spend more with your business. 

Furthermore, if customers receive a positive experience, they are more likely to talk about it. Research shows that 3% of CX-fueled revenue is from word of mouth. 

#4: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Development

It is important to be aware of where your customers are coming from in order to promote the growth of your business. As a QSR owner, you should be able to look at a map and point to where your customers are coming from. If not, you need to be leveraging customer surveys to answer those questions.

Once you are able to pinpoint where your customers are coming from, you can use it to inform your business decisions. Are you planning on expanding and opening new locations? Your customer feedback will help you decide where to put your stores. 

Leveraging customer feedback not only helps you sustain your current business, but also helps you grow and build your business. 

#5: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Marketing

Any time you unveil a new item, promotion, or special, the customer needs to be at the heart of that campaign. 

A globally popular restaurant chain and InMoment customer recently tested new menu items out in their stores. The company thought it was time for a change, and ended up replacing two items that had been on the menu for years. After taking these older items off the menu, they quickly received heaps of customer complaints asking them to bring those items back. 

For marketers, customer feedback helps you to bridge the gap between what you perceive customers want from your brand, and what they actually need from you to keep coming back for more.

Everyone Owns the Customer Experience—And Everyone Can Benefit

In order to deliver on customer expectations, every department needs to have a line of sight into the customer experience. The information you receive from customers needs to be shared with all other departments and teams, not siloed in different departments, otherwise, you could be sitting on insights that could make a huge difference in your bottomline. When you break down those silos and create channels of communication across departments, your business will see more success in the areas that matter most!

For more information on using feedback throughout your organization, read our ebook here! 

Why Your Brand Needs to Desilo Customer Journeys Today

As customer experiences grow more complex, so too have customer expectations. This has become especially true in recent years, as customers take an increasingly multichannel approach to interacting with brands, purchasing products, and relaying concerns. For this and other reasons, there’s never been a greater need for brands to meet this multichannel expectation and desilo journeys than right now. Let’s get into how and why organizations should accomplish this.

A Broader View

One of the most pressing reasons to desilo customer journeys is to achieve an omnichannel view of customers. Brands can do this by integrating call center transcripts, web data, and operational metrics from across multichannel journeys (with the help of a proper experience platform). Feeding this data, this context, back into the organization helps your brand create a meaningfully improved experience for your customers.

Additionally, though creating a better customer experience is the primary goal here,, brands will find that they can also accomplish key business objectives with this more holistic view of their customers. These include greater customer acquisition, better customer retention, heightened cross-selling to your existing customer base, and lowering cost to serve, all of which result in a stronger bottom line.

A Smarter Approach

Another reason brands should desilo customer journeys is because doing so makes your Voice of the Customer (VoC) and other feedback tools smarter. As experiences have grown more multichannel, customers have grown to expect brands to remember them, their preferences, and whether certain interactions have occurred already. Desiloing journeys allows brands to achieve all of this while also removing irrelevant questions and making feedback collection more conversational.

This idea only makes sense when you consider that each piece of a VoC program is a chance to learn something new or different about a customer. The more disparate pieces of info you can collect and assemble, the more complete the picture of your customers becomes. A multichannel approach to VoC can thus help brands round out that aforementioned omnichannel customer view that’s so important to experience improvement.

The Road to Success

While customers should be the primary beneficiary of journey desiloing, employees benefit from this approach as well. The biggest benefit that employees can reap from desiloed journeys and data is having a complete set of information on customers’ interactions and expectations. When employees have that knowledge and the ability to act on it, they can take pride in having delivered a better customer experience, which boosts their morale. It also helps them understand how their work fits into the customer journey and how it connects with that of other teams.

To sum up, desiloing journeys allows brands to get a 360-degree view of customers that’s essential for improving experiences, create a multichannel experience that treats customers more like people than support tickets, and gives employees a chance to work toward the same commonly understood customer experience goal. This results in both a fundamentally connective experience for customers and transformational success for the brands that can provide it.

Click here to learn more about desiloing customer journeys (and to see an example of that process in action) in my Point of View on this subject.

Change Region

Selecting a different region will change the language and content of inmoment.com

North America
United States/Canada (English)
Europe
DACH (Deutsch) United Kingdom (English)
Asia Pacific
Australia (English) New Zealand (English) Asia (English)