Financial Institutions: Putting the Customer at the Heart of Your Business

Traditional financial institutions have typically operated in a product-centric way, presenting new products that are created by a product committee, with the company’s bottom line at the heart of them. Rarely are the true needs of each customer taken into consideration, and communication is primarily a one-way channel, from the financial institution to the customer.

When financial institutions are structured in this way, they are unable to fully capitalize on the continuous flow of information provided to them through customer interactions and behaviors. As customers become more familiar with receiving extremely personalized and relevant experiences from their favorite vendors, they come to expect the same level of personalization from their financial institutions. Thus, the customer, not the product, should be at the real heart of a financial institution’s bottom line.

Cutting edge financial institutions already recognize the important of building a personalized experience for their customers, and are beginning to understand that they need to fundamentally change to become truly customer-centric.

True customer centricity requires unlocking silos (organizational, system and data) and the collaboration of both cross-functional teams, vendors and suppliers as “partners within the value chain” to innovate and radically change the customer experience. At the crux of the customer experience should include the up-to-date customer knowledge, with data from all systems, so that systems can access a holistic and individual-customer view.

Having the right technology in place becomes imperative in the quest to provide the best customer experience. The benefits of adopting a technology that allows your institution to be more customer-centric are two-fold – you will not only be better equipped to serve your customers, but you’ll see real revenue growth achieved with ease like never before.

For further interest:

• The Value of Customer Data
• Credit Unions and Digital Transformation
• Client Story: US Retail Bank