Five Strategic Projects to Help Any Regional Bank be More Competitive and Achieve Growth
Here are five strategic banking projects that every local and regional bank should be doing – right now – to not only keep up with the competition, but also to establish a consistently strong customer experience that creates a lasting competitive advantage and is proven to accelerate growth.
Every banking strategy should start with the customer and their experience.
Too many banks – as well as organizations from pretty much every industry – have tried to compete and grow by repeatedly allocating more financial and tech resources to every challenge.
But these digital investments aren’t paying off.
Why? Because too few banks are putting their customers at the core of the digital solutions they’re developing. Again and again, we see banks developing tech for tech’s sake instead of leveraging the potential of this technology to improve their Customer Experience.
If, however, you look at every interaction as an opportunity to meet or exceed customer expectations, your bank is nearly guaranteed to increase conversions, loyalty, and lifetime customer value – leading to the sustainable growth that all banks are longing for.
- Banks that consistently optimize their CX grow 3.2x faster than competitors.
- Highly personalized CX enables 40% higher revenue per customer and 30% uptick in adoption rate of recommended products.
- Banks that provide highly consistent CX across channels experienced a 55% higher Net Promoter Score (on average) than banks with disparities of experiences.
Strategic Banking Project #1: Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is the one project that lays the strategy for all other experience-related projects throughout your bank. (And let’s be honest, pretty much every project impacts the employee or customer experience, if not both.)
By thoroughly studying customers’ different journeys through your bank, you are better able to understand the needs and expectations of your diverse customer types – enabling you to focus on the most critical steps of each journey, exceed customer expectations, and optimize their experiences.
Customer Journey Mapping is an Enduring Discipline.
It’s critical to remember that journey mapping is not a one-time thing. Effective journey mapping is an ongoing process that systematically uncovers customer needs and pain points as your CX evolves, marketplaces change, and customer expectations increase.
What’s involved in journey mapping? It starts with defining the current customer experience and then interviewing customers to learn their true needs, expectations, and motivators; conducting and studying the results of both quantitative and qualitative research of customers engagements; defining the different ideal customer experiences; and finally creating your living journey map that prioritizes the iterative tasks and projects identified.
By remaining committed to journey mapping, your bank will build a deep understanding of your customers and eventually develop an almost intuitive level of customer understanding that will inform everything you do – enabling you to go beyond just fixing unsatisfactory experiences, to serving up personalized experiences that differentiate your bank, build life-long customers, enable growth, and provide a tangible ROI.
And with this living journey map in hand, you can then more strategically attack nearly any project within your bank.
Four Other Strategic Banking Projects that Drive Growth
Your journey mapping will identify which projects your bank should take on and in what order you should approach them. However, our experience and these key banking trends have proven that the following four projects are always good ones to at least consider as you develop your plan of attack.
Account Origination Modernization
Recent research shows that 78% of customers prefer to open accounts online. And over half report abandoning such processes if they experience excessive friction in the process.
It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of the role played by account origination in any banking growth strategy. Without new accounts, you won’t grow.
So we must ask: How do people establish accounts with your bank? Can they do it online? On the app? Is it equally convenient on their phone and their computer? Where are people abandoning the process? How does the origination process differ in a branch compared to online? Can either inform the other?
As customers from all generations are doing more and more of everything online – and the majority of those experiences are getting easier and more personalized all the time – it’s vital that you provide an intuitive account origination process. If not, you’ll consistently lose potential new customers to those banks that do.
Data Assessment and Strategy
Your data informs decisions, enables personalization, improves every aspect of your CX, and empowers (or will empower) your AI solutions.
Is your data strategy allowing your data to do all of this? If you’re not sure – or you’re confident it’s not – a Data & AI Strategy Assessment should be your next project.
A proper assessment will identify and address any gaps in your data infrastructure, quality, strategy, or protocols – leading to a roadmap your team can follow to go from where you are to wherever your business goals need you to be.
This type of assessment repeatedly informs our collaborations with banks to ensure they are properly collecting, organizing, analyzing, sharing, and leveraging their data throughout their organizations for the biggest customer experience and business impact.
Employee Experience Transformation for Small Businesses
A common challenge for banks of all sizes is team members not knowing how to help small business owners – an often-underserved customer segment that is a missed opportunity for many banks.
How much of an opportunity? There are over 15 million US companies with less than 20 employees, and the owners of nearly 80% of small- and mid-sized businesses are expecting revenue growth this year.
Tellers and other branch employees are normally experts in helping retail customers. And larger businesses have dedicated account managers who can help them navigate nearly any challenge. But small businesses can easily fall through the cracks if your employees don’t have the knowledge and confidence to help.
To best prepare your branch associates for success, start by identifying the industry verticals that are both likely to come into your branch and industries you’re best prepared to serve. This focus will help guide decisions on what products and services to prioritize, and also help reduce the amount of information your branch associates will need to learn.
Additionally, to help your branch associates have the right consultative and personalized conversations that drive customer engagement and conversion, you can leverage innovative technology to provide associates with easy access to accurate information and the right tools.
Commercial Customer Experience Transformation
While most banking CX advancements over the past couple of years have been focused on consumer banking, the needs and expectations are just as high from your commercial customers.
They’re buying and selling products online. They’re doing payroll online. They’re managing benefits programs online. They’re expecting to do the majority of their banking online as well. And there is no reason their online commercial banking experience shouldn’t be as convenient and intuitive as their consumer banking experience.
You could begin with the most routine commercial banking transactions, as well as those that most closely resemble consumer interactions. But as we explained just a couple hundred words earlier, the best place to start is by carefully mapping the journey of these valuable customers so you can confidently identify their unique pain points and start exceeding their specific expectations.
Is Your Bank Ready to Grow?
There are common challenges facing most regional banks. And the projects listed here are likely some of the first your bank should take on to achieve your growth objectives.
However, your bank is unique, and a conversation with one of our consultant partners is the best way for you to determine how and where to start. But there’s no question as to when you should start – right now.