Products and platforms
TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights™
TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights™
in this article
the 451 take
Customers’ experiences, not products or transactions, drive engagement and create competitive differentiation. The financial services industry was one of the first to adopt a digital culture, enhancing the client experience. As a result, formal transformation strategies have doubled over the last three years: 60% of institutions are embracing formal digital transformation strategies. But with most consumers now seeking out digital experiences – especially given the impacts of COVID-19 – financial institutions must reshuffle their priorities.
As financial institutions move toward a lighter branch footprint but amplified touch experiences, they will need to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and data activation to determine the best way to engage with customers and respond to their fast-evolving needs. Focusing on several key areas can help improve the customer experience:
Deliver personalized customer journeys up to the ‘last mile’ from acquisition to servicing.
Improve credit decisioning to streamline lending journeys and drive automation.
Protect customers from fraud and risk exposure while speeding resolutions.
Reduce risk concentration with default prediction and improved collection strategies.
Deepen relationships through personalized servicing and engagement.
Banks, insurance companies and other financial services organizations must move beyond stalled data management programs focused on a golden record. Currently 59% of institutions are still trying to implement a data-driven strategy, and our data also shows that 73% are either overly siloed or lacking in the ability to turn data into action. They need to build on disparate data sources to effectively contextualize and operationalize critical data and insights into actions required by the various organizational stakeholder groups that have a hand in shaping the customer experience.
59% of institutions are still trying to implement a data-driven strategy
Q: To what extent is your organization taking active steps to become more ‘data driven’ (that is, to embed data-driven decision-making at the heart of the business)? (n=80)
Q: Which of the following customer experience use cases are most driving your organization’s future investments? Please select all that apply
Source: 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Customer Experience and Commerce, Digital Maturity 2020
Financial firms need new approaches and strategies to ensure they can turn data into action to drive wallet share. They need to arm customer-facing relationship managers, tellers, and customer service agents with the ability to deliver superior customer interactions and empathetic, contextual engagement using real-time data at the point of interaction. Among surveyed institutions, 41% want to optimize the customer journey to reduce friction points, 36% want to improve personalization for micro-segmentation and targeting, and 35% want to build a real-time, unified view of the customer to improve customer retention and loyalty.
As institutions work to secure loyalty and revenue, the implementation of technologies that facilitate contextualized – near-real-time or real-time – experiences to drive stickier relationships and competitive differentiation are likely to rise to the top of the priorities list. A major strategy is to leverage data to understand customer actions and intent across the customer journey. In 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Budgets & Outlook 2019 survey, 64% of financial services organizations said that data analytics and platforms have the biggest game-changing potential over the next three years.
business impact
Today’s empowered customers are constantly bombarded with information; they are now dictating the terms of engagement with businesses to a much greater degree than was previously possible. As firms continue to make a digital culture central to their organization, they need to invest in new technologies to address customer demands for faster credit decisions, improved risk modeling or fraud detection and better cross-selling opportunities.
Embrace data to drive real-time hyper-personalization for increased conversion. Institutions can combine first-, second-and third-party data (such as that from a bank’s affiliate partners) with AI and ML technology to provide more contextually relevant offers or even next best actions via affinity models and event-based marketing. Enterprises should focus on programs that synthesize the data from various sources to provide actionable responses at the moments of influence, enabling faster and more personalized interactions with customers and driving successful outcomes.
Turn data into action across the customer journey to proactively engage during critical moments. This means delivering relevant experiences and uncovering insights that provide context for real-time proactive engagement – warning of deteriorating credit or covenant breaches, offering options for small businesses, or measuring the financial health and wellness of customers, for example. Institutions can offer completely automated digital experiences via ATMs and mobile apps or improve contact-center operations for customers who still require assisted services. Regardless of the channel or context of the interaction, the ability to successfully navigate micro-moments requires real-time data and event-based triggers.
Ensure trust with empathic responses. Formulating responses based on the language, tone, and content of conversations with customers is more important than ever in earning trust and loyalty. Institutions should use data to understand customer sentiment and track life-changing events such as mortgages, refinancing activity, and marriage by creating intelligent, real-time 360-degree profiles of consumers – such as, current products, call history, social information. This will help them address customer desires on a more personal level and improve retention. Ensuring privacy has also become a critical requirement for firms to earn and maintain the trust of their customers. Because data privacy, security and risk are now interdependent, modern platforms that process unstructured data and run real-time analytics must offer speed, agility, and embedded privacy.
Figure 1- Financial institutions’ analysis by the 451 Research group in 2021.
451 Research is a leading information technology research and advisory company focused on technology innovation and market disruption. Founded in 2000, 451 Research is a part of S&P Global Market Intelligence. Copyright © 2021 S&P Global Market Intelligence. The content of this artifact is for educational purposes only. S&P Global Market Intelligence does not endorse any companies, technologies, products, services, or solutions. Permission to reprint or distribute any content from this artifact requires the prior written approval of S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Financial firms need new approaches and strategies to ensure they can turn data into action to drive wallet share. They need to arm customer-facing relationship managers, tellers, and customer service agents with the ability to deliver superior customer interactions and empathetic, contextual engagement using real-time data at the point of interaction. Among surveyed institutions, 41% want to optimize the customer journey to reduce friction points, 36% want to improve personalization for micro-segmentation and targeting, and 35% want to build a real-time, unified view of the customer to improve customer retention and loyalty.
As institutions work to secure loyalty and revenue, the implementation of technologies that facilitate contextualized – near-real-time or real-time – experiences to drive stickier relationships and competitive differentiation are likely to rise to the top of the priorities list. A major strategy is to leverage data to understand customer actions and intent across the customer journey. In 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Digital Pulse, Budgets & Outlook 2019 survey, 64% of financial services organizations said that data analytics and platforms have the biggest game-changing potential over the next three years.
Looking ahead
For financial services firms to effectively compete in a data-driven AI-led experience economy, they must capture and analyze data using AI and data activation engines to understand their customers, predict customer intent, and deliver appropriate action to meet customers’ needs. Success requires investments in modern data platforms that make the shift from data management to data insights and, increasingly, to data actions.
plug-and-play engine
TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights customer analytics software for banking and insurance provides actionable AI-ML and data-driven insights that help financial institutions deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences at the right time over customers’ preferred channels. TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights is tailored for banks and insurance providers with out-of-the-box, ready-to-deploy use cases that result in faster time to value. It accelerates operationalizing AI-ML and leverages existing IT investments across cloud and on-premises, avoids vendor lock-in, and enables users to develop and deploy their own additional analytics use cases, making TCS Customer Intelligence & Insights a plug-and-play analytic and data activation engine for your customer insights and action needs.
