Today, more data is produced in a day than ever before – with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created daily across myriad business ecosystems. And with 90% of the worlds’ information having been elicited in the last two years alone, it is conspicuous that data will keep growing.
In the current digital transformation era, various businesses – from online retailers to healthcare giants – are mining this humongous information to deliver customer value and improve their bottom line. This task is extremely crucial for financial services too.
No doubt, the finance industry is inundated with data – ranging from mortgage applications and bank transactions to in-store or app interactions. This information plays a significant role in helping organizations comprehend their customers’ expectations and identify strengths and weaknesses, and the challenge with this voluminous data lies in being able to ingest it, integrate it, understand it, and use it to deliver value in terms of improved customer retention and higher ROI.
For example, many retail banks have leveraged data to provide delightful customer experiences and remain competitive with the emergence of challenger banks.
However, if the experiences delivered are not personalized enough, then chances of clients turning away from the bank of their choice to a challenger bank are high.
So how can companies ensure that they are making the most of their end-to-end customer data and using the right technology?
In this three-part discussion, our objective is to highlight the impact of a customer data platform on finance and how users can implement the solution to understand their customers and gain actionable insights to optimize business. Take a plunge into the steps financial firms must take to ensure they are capturing, integrating, and getting the most out of their customer data.
Capture
For finance companies, the road to purchase is more difficult than it sounds. Even though they mustgo through the stages of awareness, consideration, conversion and evaluation, this path is distorted, and quite often consumers move back and forth between the stages.
The problem occurs because:
- 1.With an increasing number of touchpoints, some businesses fail to capture all this data. Financial organizations must make sure that they ingest this data properly. In doing so, they will need a modern customer data ingestion platform. These solutions will help organizations collect and ingest data from different sources into a database, where it can be stored, accessed, and utilized.
- 2.Now, even if a company captures interactions seamlessly, most businesses fail to integrate this disparate data, creating silos. Such disintegrated data acts as a roadblock for organizations while making decisions. With a customer data integration platform in place, however, this problem can be resolved as firms can easily integrate myriad datasets into a unified database and break down these deadly data silos to produce a holistic view of the customer.
Identify
Though customer data integration is important, it is of little value if firms don’t know who it belongs to. Finance units must combine their data sources and attach anonymized data (such as which affiliate website was used to enter your website) to known identifiers like an email address to gain a deeper understanding about their customers – where they came from, what they demands are, and how they interacted.
Understand
Finally, organizations must investigate all marketing channels in place to calibrate costing – and identify which of the channels are bringing in revenue. This proves useful as it allows companies make accurate decisions and evaluate the impact of marketing activities on ROI.
Conclusion
Indeed, customer data underpins decision-making. Unless it is properly captured, ingested, and integrated into a unified database effectively, finance units remain unaware to who their customers are, what their needs and requirements are, and how they are interacting with their marketing channels on their path to conversion – and without this crucial information, they will not be able to create the foundation for more optimized omnichannel experiences.