The best financial services companies understand the importance of providing meaningful customer experiences. They achieve this by personalising their interactions with customers through timely and highly personalised messages and digital content based on past interactions and real-time browsing behavior. They greet customers by name, whether on the phone, email, or SMS, and prioritise the customer experience above all else. But most often, its not that easy to achieve this level of customer engagement.
Despite the importance of meaningful customer experiences, many financial services companies have difficulties meeting customer expectations due to outdated technology, legacy systems, lack of data and an inability to orchestrate customer journeys across different channels, including messaging channels like SMS & OTTs.
Engaging customer experiences begins with data
With more stringent data privacy regulations, companies must earn the right to collect consumer data. The flood of irrelevant messages leads consumers to find ways to filter, block and ignore e-mails, even e-mails they subscribed to in the first place. Marketing and customer service departments must diversify the way they connect with consumers. Regardless of channel, they must put the customer experience above all else. Providing personalised, instant, and positive customer experiences in the customer's preferred channel increases your company's chance of being more valuable than your competition.
Many companies still lack a 360-view of the consumer, and data is kept in silos. The current martech stack and customer experience applications are sometimes disconnected from managing the customer journey or cannot meet data management and integration requirements. As a result, many financial services companies cannot react to behavioural and engagement-triggered data to deliver targeted offers and messaging to any device or channel.
Send the right message at the right time in the right channel
Your systems should respond to your customer interactions, automatically moving them from one path in the journey to another in response to their behaviour. This requires gathering real-time data, acting on customer insights at the appropriate time in the journey and orchestrating the channels. What if your bank proactively could text you saying that they have noticed that you are having trouble accessing your account and thus offer help with a call-to-action button to start a real-time conversation in a blink to solve the problem? When you send the right message to the right person at the right time, you'll be able to create experiences that make things easier for your customer, thus building customer engagement, loyalty, and advocacy.
Messaging is a powerful tool that can build engagement at any stage of the customer journey
Multiple new channels have added enormous complexity to the customer journey, making it much more difficult to deliver a consistent experience at scale. Legacy systems were not built to support customer-first experiences across multiple channels, including mobile messaging. Adding new messaging channels, with new rich formats like Rich SMS or OTT (WhatsApp, etc.), means new ways to connect and create a stronger bond with your customers.
In order to be able to send relevant and timely messages in the customer's preferred channel, companies should empower customers to manage their preferences for better ROI.
Use cases for banks & insurance companies
Banks and financial services companies can utilise SMS notifications for various purposes, and end customers find notifications focusing on utility and value most useful. It's worth investing time in understanding your customer preferences and allowing customers to set their preferences regarding what they want to see and not see, as well as which channels they prefer (E-mail, push notifications, SMS, WhatsApp, etc. The most common messaging scenario in financial services is consumers getting a one-time-password for sign-in, but there are many other use cases to explore, for example:
- two-way conversations with customer service
- appointments and reminders
- fraud notifications
- filling out forms via messaging
- interactive call-to-action messages with landing pages
- promotional messages; including unique URL:s and personalised landing pages
- interactive loan calculators
Rich messaging experiences - mobile-first communication
Today's marketing, CRM, and CX systems must ensure personalised communication with customers on their preferred channels. Rich messaging is here to stay. It provides customers with app-like experiences, improving customer engagement and conversion rates. Rich messaging can revolutionise one-to-one messages (transactional SMS) with customers, leading to more meaningful conversations (real-time dialogue).
Rich SMS and instant messaging apps (OTT) like WhatsApp and Messenger allow marketers to create personalised SMS and landing pages using your company's custom font, logo, and branding. Rich messaging supports images, colours, videos, GIFS, CTA buttons, and more for a higher impact.
By leveraging rich messaging, your business can also provide its customers with on-demand support and easy self-service options through simple call-to-action buttons. Customers now no longer need to phone your call center if they don't want to. Instead, they can send a text message via their favourite channel, reporting things like overcharges or erroneous transactions. With rich messaging, your customers can send a PDF of their bank statement, a picture of an invoice or a transaction statement directly to the customer care department through the preferred messaging channel, making it easy for your customers.
About LEKAB
At LEKAB, we can help banks and financial services companies to improve customer engagement across mobile channels with targeted messaging. Our digital tools and APIs simplify business processes and communications, from complex enterprise solutions to process automation. Let us show you how SMS and rich messaging can enhance your communication strategy, boost productivity, and increase availability to end-customers. Want to learn more about messaging in the customer journey and OTT? Talk to our expert team!