However, if you haven’t yet realized these benefits, you might be questioning your purchase decision. Don’t. You made a great choice. You just need the help of an experienced partner to leverage the power of Sitecore.
Of all the benefits Sitecore can provide, personalization has the greatest potential to impact the relationship between you and your customers. For example, a recent J.D. Power study on retail banking found that customers are expecting “a personalized mix of financial advice, hands-on help with problem resolution, and guidance on how to grow their money.” Unfortunately, only 44% of customers felt their banks were delivering such support.
But it’s exactly these types of tailored and personalized experiences that have a significant impact on your business. According to a Forrester study commissioned by Blend, banks with mature personalization programs were nearly three times more likely to outperform their goals in cross selling and customer acquisition, and they experienced a 171% overperformance in their digital transformation goals.
Maximize the Power of Sitecore
While realizing the benefits of any platform or tool requires technical expertise, it also requires experience in aligning the tool to your business objectives. In the case of Sitecore, that means aligning to sales goals, marketing strategies, customer journeys, and customer segmentation. Below we take a closer look at the steps we use to ensure our clients reap the full set of rewards of their Sitecore platform implementation.
Start with your Customer Experience Strategy.
The first task in maximizing your instance of the Sitecore Platform is mapping out the ideal experience for each of your customer personas. What do they need? What do they want? What are they currently not experiencing from you or your competition? How does and should their experience vary (if any) across touchpoints?
And quite possibly the most important question: What do you want and need them to do?
Look at your business goals and marketing objectives, independent of what tools you are or could potentially be using. Explore how you can optimize the Customer Experience across your website, app, kiosks, customer service, and other digital and in-person touchpoints to encourage your desired actions and achieve your goals and objectives.
Map Sitecore Capabilities to Ideal CX.
Once you’ve defined your ideal Customer Experience – and specifically identified how that experience should vary across your customer personas – you now need someone with the technical expertise to align that ideal CX to the capabilities of the Sitecore Platform.
Specifically, you need a partner who can help you leverage the personalization, customer data, and marketing automation components of Sitecore to increase conversions, customer engagement, and brand loyalty.
Personalize for Everyone’s Benefit.
As one of the keys to fueling growth and differentiation, creating a personalized banking experience can improve the customer experience for each individual customer – while simultaneously introducing cross-sale opportunities and increasing retention.
The Sitecore Platform provides four types of personalization to help you create a unique and optimized experience for each customer.
- Rule-Based Personalization enables you to customize each customer’s experience based on predetermined factors – including account mix, purchase history, current balances, services investigated, and more.
- Location-Based Personalization allows you to present different products, services, or offers to people based on where they’re located.
- Persona-Based Personalization gives you the ability to vary the Customer Experience based on identified demographic and psychographic characteristics.
- AI-Based Personalization leverages machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics to adjust the Customer Experience according to previous behaviors of both that specific customer and other customers.
Effectively merging personalization techniques can deepen customer engagement with your brand, leading to increased loyalty and higher customer lifetime values. Ultimately creating a lasting and beneficial relationship between the customer and your brand.
Turn Data into Instantly Usable Solutions.
Data is immensely powerful, especially when you can capture, standardize, and use that data across all customer touchpoints.
With real-time, user-specific, data-informed insights, you can use Sitecore to shape what products you develop and offer, inform how and when you offer those solutions, and enable highly targeted (even micro-segmented) delivery of these offerings and promotions.
Sitecore in Action
At G2O, our team has leveraged the power of Sitecore to help a variety of clients (banking and non-banking alike) transform their customer experience and achieve their business objectives. Below are two great examples:
Regional Bank
Known for its exceptional customer service in its 350+ physical locations, this bank wanted a digital presence to match. To accomplish this goal, our team helped define the bank’s ideal Customer Experience, and then leveraged the personalization and data visualization capabilities of Sitecore to bring that CX to life on the website and in-branch kiosks.
This omni-channel solution streamlined the ecommerce and checkout experience, increasing average products purchased per-customer by 60%.
To learn more about how we helped this regional bank create a unified digital Customer Experience that has the institution set up for continued success, please click here.
National Homebuilder
This leading national homebuilder was already using Sitecore, but knew they were not realizing all its potential. They also needed to update their version of Sitecore to continue receiving support.
We worked with multiple teams within their organization to identify all homebuyer touchpoints. Then, we used the personalization functionality of Sitecore to streamline all these touchpoints into a single portal, walking the buyer through each step and enabling real-time information and communication.
Among many other benefits, this solution reduced cancellation rates by more than 4X the original expectations.
Learn more about the portal here.
How Do You Get There?
To maximize the value of your Sitecore Platform, we must look at it as not only a technology tool, but also a marketing, communications, and business tool.
If you’d like to discuss how G2O, as a Sitecore Silver Partner, can work with you and your team to transform your Customer Experience and truly realize the power of Sitecore, please reach out. We’d love to learn about your specific situation and how we can help.