Listening to the Customer in the 21st Century: It’s All About Data

The customer has never been more right. Across industries, customers have become conditioned to demand not only near-instant responses to their needs but that their needs be anticipated in advance. Financial institutions are not given a pass, despite a competitive landscape flooded with regulation and privacy considerations. The customer still has expectations for a personalized, timely, and relevant experience.

For those who master the art of delivering a modern customer experience, there are huge rewards. A Mckinsey study shows that customer-centric banks outperform peers, delivering 55% higher returns.  How can financial institutions improve the customer experience? By using data to listen to their customers better.  The most innovative companies use data and analytics to offer appropriate products and services.

To start, they look to traditional financial services data, combining and correlating account activity, borrowing history, core banking, investments, and call center data. The innovation, however, comes with their ability to analyze new, sometimes unstructured, data sources including clickstream data, location data, social media streams, news feeds, chatbots, and more. 

As these new sources cause data volumes to multiply, advanced analytics and machine learning are the only effective ways to analyze the vast quantities of information and help realize insight. McKinsey cites an example where a financial services firm reduced repeat calls by 15% using advanced analytics to examine repeat call behavior to find the true causes.

Sample Customer Successes 

Given the complexity and variety of traditional and newer sources of data, financial services providers are reinventing their data management and analytics strategy—transitioning to a multi-function, open platform that is optimized for the massive scale and security of the data that the industry demands. Cloudera helps organizations form a more complete understanding of their customers, and their needs, to shape a new type of customer experience.

The focus on customer experience is a critical component to a bank’s digital transformation strategy.  Banks are driving initiatives forward in areas of targeted marketing, customer retention and proactive customer care.  Below are three examples of customers that have utilized enhanced data and analytics to advance their customer experience initiatives: 

Rabobank – In order to help its customers—including small businesses—become more self-sufficient and improve debt settlement, Rabobank needed access to a varied mix of customer data. While Rabobank has always had access to this data, drawing meaningful insight from it was a different matter. 

Using the Cloudera platform, Rabobank is able to rapidly process historical and real-time data together, building better models and more accurately predicting warning signs of a default on a loan. Rabobank runs sophisticated machine learning algorithms and financial models to help customers manage their financial obligations, including loan repayments. 

DBS – DBS was dedicated to using a data-driven approach to deliver a superior customer experience, but the company’s traditional technology stack for supporting advanced analytics was expensive to scale and not flexible enough to predict customer needs across channels. 

With Cloudera, DBS has the ability to more easily store and analyze billions of events in a modern data platform and answer questions before they’re asked to more effectively engage customers and deliver better service. 

YES BANK – YES BANK has many systems generating structured and unstructured data, from hundreds of applications, clickstreams, logs, emails, text messages, push notifications, etc. However, the bank’s federated data marts gave each business only enough data to substantiate its own business. No one at YES BANK was operating with a full 360-degree customer view. 

YES BANK partnered with Cloudera to build a unified on-premise data management platform that provides speed, agility, flexibility, and storage capacity to process unstructured data and run real-time analytics while heightening the data security necessary to meet high governance standards and stringent data security regulations.

Find out more about how these organizations approached these challenges and the resulting benefits in our new paper: Using Data and Analytics to Enhance Customer Experience in Financial Services.

Over 520 financial services organizations globally turn to Cloudera to help them better listen to and understand their customers using data and analytics. Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) is the industry’s first enterprise data cloud, offering a full range of analytic capabilities from the Edge to AI. A data-driven approach empowers financial services to better listen and understand their customers and provide timely advice. You can learn more about enhancing the customer experience in Financial Services here

Sandra Horn
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