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6 steps to the ultimate CXThe essential guide to optimizing customer
communications for financial services organizations
B R O C H U R E
Banks won’t cease to exist, but the banking experience of today will.Brett King, FinTech Guru
Table of contentsIntroduction ................................................................................... 4
Step 1: Clean up your communications inventories ........................ 6
Step 2: Be vigilant about using plain language ............................. 8
Step 3: Adopt the “3 C’s”: consistency, collaboration, and compliance .............................................................................10
Step 4: Ensure your communications are content-centric ...............14
Step 5: Empower your marketers and reduce reliance on IT ........16
Step 6: Invest in personalization ...................................................17
IntroductionImproving the customer experience (CX) is the driving force in financial services
today. It’s the key to customer retention and successful cross-selling, which are both
critical to increasing revenues. But achieving that ultimate goal of a seamless
experience still presents significant challenges due to how most banks manage
their customer communications.
Marketing campaigns for various products and servicing communications are usually
undertaken by different teams and departments within a bank. While each of these
communications may have merit on their own, the customer sees a disjointed
stream of communications and messages.
All too often, each communication ends up looking and feeling like it’s coming
from a different banking organization—or worse, doesn’t acknowledge the customer
engagement that’s already taken place.
Today’s customers expect more—they want to know their bank has a unified view of
all their transactions. Disjointed marketing efforts and communications risk leaving
your customers with the impression that their bank is interested in selling them a lot
of products, but not interested in understanding their actual needs.
Taking a different view
The most effective way to avoid this risk is to make an organizational effort to
move from an inside-out to an outside-in point of view when communicating
with customers.
The outside-in approach views every communication from the customer’s
perspective; it uses the data your bank has to gain an understanding of what
the customer’s needs are, and it communicates those needs in a way that’s
consistent in brand and tone across all touchpoints.
The result? That seamless customer experience every financial institution is
looking for. Companies that behave like they’re in the “customer experience”
business—i.e. those focused on how they communicate and
service customers—are the ones winning new business.
So how can you get to an outside-in approach to communications to
achieve the resulting CX your customers want?
In the chapters ahead, we’ll explore the six essential steps financial services
organizations need to take to prepare for the communications experience
of tomorrow.
“Customers are three to four times more likely to say they trust brands that communicate clearly. And when customers trust a brand, they prefer it to other brands. In contrast, when companies do not communicate clearly, customers perceive the brand to be deceptive or unethical— as literally trying to cheat them.”– Read My Lips: Clear Communication Can Mean Billions in Revenue, Forrester
Step 1
Clean up your communications inventories.The path to achieving and maintaining the desired CX through better
communications starts with cleaning up content and communications inventories.
Revitalizing communications by replacing unnecessary jargon and unclear or
inconsistent messages with clear, concise language is guaranteed to move the
needle in the right CX direction. The ability to build loyalty, add value, and enhance
the experience of customers in new and more profitable ways is heavily reliant on
ensuring consistency across communications, and you can’t do this if teams are still
relying on varied messages and brand interpretations.
So where do you start?
The goal of cleaning your inventory is to understand the content that exists, and to
identify an intelligent way to organize, standardize, and simplify it so that it sends a
clear message and supports a positive CX.
Performing this type of comprehensive assessment makes it possible to identify
duplicate content that’s spread across multiple communications—for example,
there may be certain paragraphs from cloned content that are largely the same in 50
different letters, with the only difference being items like the name of the state
or province, or the time in which the recipient is given to respond.
Through this identification process, the number of paragraphs that need to be
rewritten and standardized to better align with the brand or message might be
reduced to 20% of the unconsolidated content volume—making the task much
more manageable.
Assess your communications inventory in three easy steps
Engage cross-functional members who have the knowledge and access
necessary to address the many technical processes and business issues that
often arise when producing customer communications.
With their help, execute a communications assessment to provide a clear
picture of how your financial organization is presenting itself to customers. If
the inventory is larger than a couple of dozen pieces, consider leveraging an
AI-powered software solution built to handle these kinds of assessments.
This communications assessment will reveal the extent to which
inconsistencies exist in the communications that are being sent out. It will
also allow organizations to consolidate inventories to reduce the number of
messages that need to be managed and ensure consistency in both brand
positioning and messaging.
Identifying what content your organization needs, what can be eliminated, and
what needs to be rewritten to enhance message clarity or brand consistency will
go a long way toward improving the quality of your communications—as well as
the organization’s CX. However, this is a difficult step, as most organizations are
dealing with “content chaos”—an expansive and varied inventory of content that’s
impossible to manually comb through and clean up.
One way to tackle this challenge is by looking for intelligent software that
leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to automate this assessment and rationalization
effort. AI-powered content analysis can dramatically speed up the process of
finding duplicate content, similar content, and inconsistencies across your
communications inventories and enable you to scale your assessment beyond
what any human could reasonably perform. Solutions are available that evaluate
more complex dimensions of content including brand inconsistencies, reading
comprehension levels, and even sentiment to truly help you take your content to
the next level.
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Step 2
Be vigilant about using plain language.Recent research by Forrester examined the impact that clear communications had
on CX scores for organizations in several industries. It may come as no surprise
that the results showed that making customer communications clearer and easier
to read improved CX significantly. What was perhaps most surprising, though, was
how dramatic the CX improvements were—scores were increased by as much as 17
points per customer. Forrester concluded, “This outsized influence translates into
a revenue impact that can be a game-changer for your bottom line.” Research like
this strongly confirms the business case for carefully reviewing the communications
financial institutions send to their customers.
The power of plain language
Communications that use plain language and good information design principles
ensure that your customers understand information the first time they read it or hear
it, avoiding the misunderstandings and errors that result in calls to the call center—or
worse, customer churn.
It’s important to remember that no one technique defines plain language. Rather,
plain language is defined by answering this question: Is it is easy to read, understand,
and use?
Unfortunately for communications professionals in regulated industries, eliminating
legalese or jargon from all documents is easier said than done. Luckily, there
are a few basic principles for writing in plain language that your customers are
sure to comprehend.
In addition, reading comprehension level assessments can be a useful tool to
ensure that your communications aren’t overly complex. Look for communications
management solutions that embed the ability to assess reading comprehension
using the Flesch Reading Ease test or the Flesch-Kincaid reading test. Having this
assessment automatically performed is a great way to ensure it is never overlooked.
Plain language principles
Active voice
Identify who is doing what. Keep the subject in front of the verb.
Common words
Use simple, easy-to-understand words. Avoid jargon and slang.
Positive tone
Where possible, rewrite to avoid negative words such as don’t, not, and can’t.
Reader focus
Write for your reader. Guide them through the material using ‘you’.
Keep it short
Keep to one idea per sentence. Remove unnecessary words.
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Step 3
Adopt the “3 C’s”: consistency, collaboration, and compliance.Consistency
Most marketers understand the importance of consistency in communications, but
it’s not always easy to achieve—particularly when you consider the ever-growing
number of communications channels available to customers.
When you’re evaluating the consistency of your customer communications, ask
yourself: “What impression do our communications have on the customer? Do
they seem like they’re coming from the same company? Are we sending the same
message in printed communications as we are in digital?”
Achieving consistency across all channels of communication hits at the core of
the customer experience. Putting the necessary processes in place to ensure your
organization is reaching out to customers with a clear and consistent voice will
improve customer relationships across all touchpoints.
The adoption of communications management solutions that enable the centralized
management of content blocks and sharing of content helps greatly to ensure
consistency. Consider, for example, the ability to centrally manage and share out a
standard product description, a salutation, contact information, and other common
pieces of content.
By managing it in one place and sharing it out to multiple documents and
communications, you can ensure consistency and also streamline key processes
such as authoring or change management.
Collaboration
The next step is to assemble a team with stakeholders from all functional areas
in your organization that generate customer communications. Each of these
stakeholders are in the best position to understand their individual communications
workflow and challenges.
Making your communications goals visible by collaborating with other stakeholders
in your business is a key step toward ensuring continued consistency and
adherence to brand standards across your company.
Benefits of collaboration across business functions
Gives organizations the ability to define their core content
with a common voice.
Simplifies the task of migrating content from disparate locations
and departments to a centralized content library.
Reduces the chance for inconsistencies in communications
which can also reduce the potential for compliance issues
or customer misunderstandings.
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Compliance
The necessity of including regulatory content in communications puts additional
pressures on financial services organizations.
It can be time-consuming, complicated and costly to communicate with customers
and still meet compliance requirements—especially when deadlines often don’t
leave much wiggle room.
Whether it’s new state or federal legislation or ongoing mandated changes
required to stay in compliance with existing regulations, such as changes to cost of
borrowing disclosures, ability to respond to change is highly dependent on the level
of control and tools you have at your disposal.
Financial services organizations need to own and be able to manage content
throughout the touchpoint messaging lifecycle. When responding to fast-breaking
change with tight timelines, the ability for business users to edit, test and approve
content changes—without impacting IT—is paramount.
One approach organizations have taken to ease this challenge is leveraging
technology that enables the creation of a centralized repository of content that
feeds into dynamic templates for communications. This approach allows a business
user to centrally manage and update all required blocks of regulatory information.
When updates are made, these systems can then feed the updated content into all
of the communications and touchpoints that contain the content.
“For traditional retail banks, communicating clearly with their customers can raise CX Index scores by 17 points per customer, resulting in $561 million in incremental revenue.”– “Read My Lips: Clear Communication Can Mean Billions in Revenue,” Forrester
The capabilities you have at your disposal to manage content is critical, as they can
help or hinder your ability to respond to regulatory changes and to ensure your
content remains compliant.
Again, in this instance, having a communications management solution that
provides centralized management of content can provide an easy solution to
controlling, maintaining, and changing regulatory content. The best of these
systems will enable a business user to control available blocks of regulatory
content and push approved content out to dynamic documents that instantly
reflect the latest revision.
Step 4
Ensure your communications are content-centric.Over the past few years, there’s been a great deal of discussion around transforming
organizations of all shapes, sizes, and verticals to be truly customer-centric in
everything they do. This renewed effort has led to a considerable emphasis on
customer data and document design for creating relevant communications.
However, even when data and design projects are deemed successful, they’re
still not enough to achieve a positive impact on the customer experience. There’s
another approach that is integral to an effective communications strategy, and it’s
something we call “content centricity.”
“Content centricity” defined
We define content centricity as purposeful and focused attention on the actual
messaging within communications to ensure alignment with your customers’ needs.
Achieving true content centricity means putting your content first—not just as an
afterthought in your communications strategy.
In our view, content centricity is essential to achieving optimal customer
experiences, no matter the technologies available or new ways to engage the
customer. New channels can be added to meet the preferences of your customers—
and they can even be made responsive—but that won’t make a difference if you
aren’t paying attention to what you’re actually saying in those communications.
What’s more, the best communications tools on the market won’t help you achieve
your CX goals if you can’t get the right content into the right tool and manage it in
an effective way.
The reality is that content is one of the most powerful weapons your organization
has to impact the CX.
So what makes “good” content?
Audience: Know who you’re connecting with. Ensure content
leverages the right tone of voice and sentiment, at the right reading
comprehension level.
Format: What’s the desired content format your audience would like
to consume?
Timing: Reach your customers at the right time, when they need
you most.
Branding: Your brand is your differentiator, and it should be present
throughout your communications.
Relevance: Just because your organization wants to say it, doesn’t
mean your customers want to hear it. Ensure all content is relevant
to the individual.
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Step 5
Empower your marketers and reduce reliance on IT.Many marketers are reliant on IT to make even the simplest of edits and changes to
their customer communications that sit in composition and other communications
systems. These teams sometimes wait months for a change to be made—even a
small change, such as a phrase, a word, or even simple punctuation in a sentence.
The result is massive delays in getting communications out the door, and financial
content that remains static and unreadable.
But just imagine how different the customer experience would be if changes to
content—regulatory as well as discretionary—happened at the hands of marketers
in just a matter of minutes or hours instead of days or months? What if marketers
could abandon their spreadsheets that organize customer segments and
communications and instead had the power to work within a system that
organized customer segments in an easy-to-use way that makes personalization
the norm—not the exception?
Step 6
Invest in personalization.Have you ever wondered how sites like Amazon recommend which products you
might want to buy, often with astounding accuracy? That’s personalization. Ever had
any experience with online dating? Your romantic encounters were likely a result of
personalization algorithms designed to help users find their perfect match. In fact,
countless modern businesses owe their success to personalization.
An audience of one
Today’s consumers want to be treated as an audience of one. They’ve come to
expect—and even demand—this level of personalization, with many considering it
the new norm. And, as businesses in other verticals have begun to master the art of
personalization, the expectations of consumers have only intensified.
Take Netflix, for example. The on-demand streaming service learns your preferences
and suggests movies and TV shows you’d like to watch from its extensive catalog.
And this strategy appears to be working for them—very well. In fact, research
suggests that 75-80% of what people watch using the service comes from what
Netflix recommends, instead of what people search for.
It comes as no surprise, then, that businesses of all varieties—including financial
services—are scrambling to apply this same logic to their own worlds.
A need for greater agility
The solution lies in moving past legacy composition systems—homegrown and
packaged software—that tie the hands of marketers and make them dependent on
IT for the simplest of changes. Organizations need to modernize their approach
to both print and digital content management and communications, and look for
systems that enable non-technical business users (like marketers and customer
service teams) across an organization to create and update communications at the
speed of business—with compliance seamlessly built in, and without burdening IT.
So what exactly is personalization when it comes to financial communications?
“Personalization” can refer to different things on your website, in emails, and in your
print materials. When done right, personalization means delivering content that
fits the needs of the customer, leading to greater customer satisfaction, increased
revenue, and lasting customer loyalty.
The goal of most financial institutions is to deliver a personalized customer
experience that helps consumers improve how they manage their day-to-day
financial lives. In doing so, banks and can elevate the level of customer engagement,
reduce costs, increase cross-selling, and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction
and loyalty. But how well are financial institutions responding to the potential of
delivering on these expectations?
Unfortunately, when it comes to banks, they all too often fall short in this regard—
they still mail credit card offers to consumers who have that same credit
card already. They send email messages offering mortgage products to 22-year-old
millennial customers who have just graduated from college and hold a mountain
of student debt.
This strategy simply can’t continue for financial institutions that want to survive—
and thrive—now and into the future.
Boston Consulting Group’s study, “The Power of Personalization,” outlines the
financial potential of personalization at a hypothetical bank with $100 billion in
assets—and the results were overwhelmingly positive. By personalizing its pricing
and product offers, such a bank could increase its everyday banking revenue by
as much as $50 million. The bank could generate up to $135 million in additional
new sales by connecting the different channels that customers might use, creating
a frictionless experience for customers who are researching new products. What’s
more, through improved personalization, the bank could identify and intervene in
situations where customers were on the verge of leaving, lowering attrition costs
by $90 million.
Making personalization a priority
Financial institutions should start making personalization work quickly with what
they already have. In other words: launch a personalization pilot in days without
striving for perfection.
For many, the biggest barrier to success comes down to focus, scale, and
commitment. In developing a personalization strategy, many banks get bogged
down trying to collect and integrate massive amounts of data instead of identifying
and collecting the right data. For others, analysis paralysis ensues, and they end
up with results they simply have no ability to act on because they still use manual
processes for executing content. Sometimes a simpler approach—one that relies
on less data that can become actionable fast—is better than more data that can’t
drive action.
Quality of data
VS
Quantity of dataQuality of data Quantity of data
Today’s customers demand that financial services organizations deliver tailored
messages that speak to their needs across all their interactions. Thankfully, there’s
new technology that makes this possible across print and digital channels. Modern
customer communications management systems give business users control over
the rules that drive personalization to enable targeted messages to be created and
sent to customer segments—without involving IT or complex data mining efforts.
One of the challenges with personalization is that it can create an explosion of
content and templates within an organization. In these cases, communications are
stored as static templates, which, over time, may reuse the same block of content
across hundreds of different variations of a letter—one for each brand, offer, or
segment. This makes edits to the templates an unwieldy and time-consuming.
One approach to resolving this common issue for enterprise organizations is to shift
from a solution that requires you to use a large inventory of static templates, to one
that enables a smaller library of dynamic templates that render multiple variations
based on business rules and targeting.
Unlike the static approach, dynamic templates automate many of the change
steps, allowing a change in a master template to be immediately cascaded down
to template variations in lower branches of the hierarchical tree—avoiding the
need to involve IT resources in the process of re-coding each and every static
communication template. The dynamic template approach makes personalization
a reality for large organizations that support multiple brands, offers and products.
While each template shares common elements defined by the parent, the
child-templates may feature personalized graphics, text, and links to efficiently
create a level of data-driven personalization otherwise unachievable. This approach
also makes it quick and easy to create new children that are inherently consistent
and personalized—offering customers and brands the best of both worlds.
Master
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ConclusionBuilding a business case for investing in communications to improve CX
The stakes for improving CX are high. Research shows that 89% of customers have
switched to a competitor because of poor CX. Additionally, 86% say they are willing
to pay more to receive a consistently superior experience. Moreover, analysts report
that 50% of customers leave every five years, and two out of three cite inadequate CX
as a reason for leaving.
Clearly, customer loyalty is something that must not only be earned—it must also be
maintained over time. All of this means you have a good business case to strengthen
your organization’s customer and client engagement programs across all channels.
When developing a strategy to prepare your organization for the customer
experience of tomorrow, ask yourself the following:
Are we putting our content in the hands of the teams who create the
communications to ensure timeliness of delivery?
Do we have the right tools to manage complex content (e.g. regulatory
content, multiple brands, multiple products or multiple offers), without having
to resort to cut-and-paste or duplication to make mass changes easier?
Do our current processes automatically update regulatory information to
ensure compliance?
Are we able to tailor our content appropriately for different audiences, such
as millennials versus seniors, or English versus Spanish speakers?
Can we easily incorporate customer data, including demographics and
transactional history, in the narratives and messages our marketers and
service teams create?
Are there streamlined targeting rules as well as approval and production
processes in place to ensure compliance and quick time-to-market with
relevant content?
To succeed moving forward, financial services organizations need to find ways to
answer each of these questions in the affirmative.
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Finally, adopt technology with a content-centric approach
In order for a customer communications strategy to truly achieve its goal of
enhancing the customer experience, we must move the idea of content to the
forefront of the discussion.
We invite you to explore the idea of content centricity and what it might do for
your CX goals: look for ways to migrate and optimize content from legacy
composition environments into a more centralized approach, look for capabilities
that encourage and support brand and message consistency, look for tools that
enable you to intelligently personalize, manage, and control the message—and
do so at scale.
Creating and distributing content that speaks directly to the wants, needs,
and pain points of your customers will most definitely strengthen your brand’s
customer experience.
What’s next?
See how Messagepoint can help your financial organization achieve customer-centricity.
Book a demo
Contact us today to request a demo or visit us online to see Messagepoint in action.