In layman terms banking has changed, as few years ago banking used to be branch centric, you could go to the bank as per the bank designated hours, fill in the paper work, rigid environment all set to be bank favourable. The banks evolved, they wanted to connect to Gen Y, provide services on Demand i.e., Anyplace, Anytime, Anywhere.
The challenge of CMO was to connect marketing to next generation using new digital channels extremely fast. Typically, to meet three objectives of marketing in banking:-
- Generate Awareness of a new product/offering,
- Engage Customers
- Drive conversions
In doing so, 100+ campaigns are launched per month, using combination of digital tools such as Marketing Automation, Email Workflow Automation, Unified Communication tools or CX tools, Asset, Brand, Pixel, Spend Management, Social Media tools, Analytics tools etc. After adding all these tools and executing using various channels, agencies, in house tools. The CMO now has a new problem. This digital piece generated huge amount of structured and unstructured data. Now, the CMO has to dig in relevant data to prepare a final single dashboard.
Various tech companies identified the problems and started building Omni channel or customer experience or analytics tools or the big data platforms to provide predictive behavior in order to improve Spend efficiency, Cost Per Engagement, Return on Investment, Single view dashboards and over all campaigns effectiveness. However, everything was technology and none of them offered the answers the CMO wants.
The answer a CMO wants are:-
– Single dashboard that is constantly updated
– Actionable insights into what’s working best across channels (ATM is not a channel but Call Center, Mobile & Internet are)
– Real Time Planning
– Simple Cross Channel Analytics
The Root Problem & Solution
Multi Product Multi Channel Marketing is a difficult beast to capture. So everyone wonders if there is a technology problem that can assist in making marketing work in Banking. It is not just the technology problem but experience problem. Most of the people in banks or otherwise have seen their lives change. Gen Y demanding everything on demand like taxis, booking movie tickets, doing things as they demanded. This pushed banks to constantly innovate channels, may it be video banking, Twitter Banking, Mobile banking, spend on digital channels has been on a constant rise. What did not change was the banks are still product focused and not customer focused. Bank customers are regular retail customer’s people who are now used to intuitive experiences and wants things instantly. Customers want simple experience. Marketing works when you make simple experiences across channels in banking.
The solution starts with:-
Segmentation
– Right mix of products
– Right segmentation identification of customers
– Right mix of channels ensuring Customer centric experience
– Right mix of digital tools
Consistent
– Customer Experience across all channels through multi-channel integration
– Marketing taxonomy across all execution platforms
– Offer channel specific end to end offering basis platform interaction capability
Data
– Right team is required to identify the right pieces of data that needs to go through the big data platform
– Performance records data of all digital channels
In essence, clear data insights provides clear decisions such as simple questions such as how did you do on a radio campaign for a product, did it drive more traffic to the site, increased loan conversions. All this is now available in seconds.
