Retail Banks

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!

Shopping for Experiences, Not Products: A Primer on Retail Customer Experience in the Experience Economy

Retail customers’ primary objective used to be providing a great product, but as brand competition fiercens and consumer expectations rise, retailers need to find new, bolder ways to stand out from the crowd. Consumers are no longer satisfied with “just” a product, and are finding different, more fundamental means of identifying (and spending money) with brands.
Retail Customer Experience

Retail brands’ primary objective used to be providing a great product, but as competition heats up and consumer expectations grow more complex, retailers need to find new, bolder ways to stand out from the crowd. And that’s why the retail customer experience is more important than ever before.

Consumers are no longer satisfied with “just” a product and are finding different, more fundamental means of identifying (and spending money) with brands.

Andrew Park, Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy & Enablement at InMoment, sat down with The Retail Focus Podcast to break down:

  1. Where customers’ expectations have been 
  2. Where they’re going
  3. What retailers can do to keep up with it all

What Is the Experience Economy?

As previously mentioned, customers used to consider a great product the end-all-be-all of an experience, but as those expectations have since evolved—and so must retail brands’ strategy. These days, retail customers prefer to spend money with brands that deliver great experiences, and great experiences go far beyond what’s on a store shelf.

It used to be that a retail experience consisted only of an in-store visit, but in this modern era (and especially since COVID), a customer’s retail experience spans so many different channels. For a customer, their overall experience is informed by a combination of the following:

  • Brand Identity 
  • Online Reviews
  • In-App Experience
  • Website Experience
  • In-Store Experience
  • Employee Interactions
  • And So Much More!

You might sense what we’re getting at here: customers consider experiences to be journeys, not single stops—and brands that fail to approach their experience accordingly won’t be able to differentiate in the experience economy.

For example, an airline may consider a passenger’s flight the extent of that individual’s experience, but this view fails to account for buying a ticket, waiting in the airport, finding a hotel, and all the other parts of the journey besides ‘just’ the flight.

What Makes for a Great Retail Customer Experience Journey?

Brands that focus only on one aspect of the experience are missing a huge opportunity. The winning organizations in the modern experience landscape create journeys that are:

Seamless

Customers should receive the same quality of experience whether they are online, in store or in app. Obviously, there will be some differences in the actual experience (in store purchases provide instant satisfaction, while online requires customers to wait for shipping), but the quality must remain the same.

A positive example of consistency comes from one of our home furnishing clients, who prides itself on the knowledgeability of its staff in store. It wanted to provide that same quality of service on their e-commerce site, and was ultimately able to stand up an online chat that gave its customers instant access to expertise.

On the other end of the spectrum, it’s extremely disruptive to a customer when a product’s online and in-store price tags differ. Customers have come to expect seamless experiences—it’s key for brands to deliver on that expectation.

End-to-End

If you’re a regular on the InMoment Blog, you’ll be familiar with our phrase, “design with the end in mind.” And there’s a reason why we return to it time and time again. When it comes to retail customer experience (and really anything in life), if you aren’t actively thinking about your desired outcome when you’re in the planning stages, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll end up with the results you want. 

So, when you are designing a customer journey, be sure to think about every step of the process, but especially the end result. Do you want customers to post about their new product? Share their excitement with friends and family? Come back for more next month? There is so much you can do to influence these actions, if only you plan for them.

Consistent

This one is pretty straightforward. If you provide consistently disappointing experiences (out of stock items, check out lines a mile long, etc.) you will be hard pressed to convince customers to return—or make a purchase in the first place. If you provide consistently excellent experiences, customers will be excited for the next time they get to shop with you, they’ll tell your friends about you, and they’ll likely buy more when they shop with you.

Now, creating consistency across multiple locations with numerous employees is a lot of work, but it is so worth it. Our proprietary research has even found that customers will spend more money with a company that provides a great experience. If you’re looking for strategies to increase consistency, check out this post or this post (centered more around your employees).

Say it with us: Designing best-in-class retail customer experience journeys is a worthwhile investment! In our decades of experience working with the world’s best known retailers, we’ve found that great customer experiences have big business pay off in these four areas:

  1. Acquiring Customers
  2. Retaining Customers
  3. Increasing Customer Lifetime Value
  4. Reducing Business Costs

Learn more about how here!

Customers Expect Great Retail Customer Experiences

It’s become common in the last 5-10 years for retailers to be compared not just to each other, but to brands from other industries and the experiences they provide. It probably comes as little surprise to most retailers that customers frequently compare them to Amazon, but what about a restaurant? 

Restaurants are not retail outlets, but if they provide a great experience, customers will come to expect similar commitment from retailers and vice-versa. The same is true of other types of businesses. (You can learn more about this cross-industry experience expectations in our Retail Experience Trends Report here.)

The final word here is just that: expectation. As we mentioned up top, customers’ expectations are growing more complex as countless brands vie for their attention. This means that, no matter whether a brand sells shoes, cars, meals, or airline tickets, it’s no longer enough to focus solely on a product. 

Make no mistake, offering a quality product is obviously still important, but it’s no longer enough to capture and hold customers’ attention. Experience is the differentiator now, and brands that endeavor to deliver a great experience will come out on top in both their verticals and in customers’ eyes.

To hear more about retail customer experience in the experience economy, listen to the full podcast episode today!

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