Tomorrow's Consumer Banking
The Role of Search
Customer expectations are changing. It is happening across geographies, age groups and social layers. Consumers look for services that are customized, efficient and meet their exact needs. The truth of the matter is that a lot of industries meet these expectations better than financial services institutions do.
Superior Customer Experience
To serve customers who are more demanding and less loyal than ever before, the majority of banks are adopting a similar strategy: increasing customer loyalty through superior customer experience. But what does this strategy really mean and what should be used as a benchmark?
In today’s digital world, banks’ call centers and websites are compared to those of online retailers, media and publishing companies, booksellers and auction houses. Research proves that 84% of Internet users leave a website if they feel they have to make too many clicks to find what they are looking for1. On the other hand, companies that spend just 10% of their Internet project budget on usability see 100% increase in sales conversion rates2. Simply enabling customers to perform their banking transactions online is no longer enough. Today’s savvy users demand intuitive, informative experiences that blend social and business content, span multiple channels and deliver instant, accurate response to their questions.
It is no wonder then that companies like Mint (consolidating users’ financial information), Geezeo (enabling social and business communities) and Prosper (providing peer-to-peer lending) are gaining momentum and taking eyeballs away from banking sites.
In order to maintain and grow their customer base, banks need to move faster, get to know their customers better and deliver intuitive, personalized banking experiences.
In recent years, search technology has evolved from an ancillary, often inaccurate, feature to an intelligent information access and presentation layer that leverages multiple contextual clues to connect users to the right information. Instead of just returning long lists of results to users’ queries, search can now deliver the right information to each user based on his or her historic activity, function and known intent.
On a basic level, enterprise search performs three functions:
1. Content processing that executes normalization and refinement operations on data and documents in advance of indexing. This is the stage where customer information is cleansed, tagged, categorized and duplicate records are eliminated (e.g. Dave Smith=David Smith=D. Smith);
2. Core indexing that aggregates both structured and unstructured information from disparate formats, sources and systems and puts it into a single index optimized for sub-second search and retrieval; and
3. Query and result processing that takes input from the user, combines it with contextual profiles, matches it to data in the index and then delivers the best content to the user in a form customized to match a desired user experience. Search supports a dynamic user experience that can be tuned to push the most relevant information to a bank’s customer or employee.
As a result, search can make customer interactions with a bank more informative, consistent, simple and even enjoyable. And search can arm a bank’s employee with access to complete and accurate customer information, which is consistent across multiple bank channels.
With access to comprehensive customer data that search makes possible, it becomes practical to offer that customer relevant information, boost products and promotions, make recommendations about related offers or content—all dynamically and in real time. This kind of execution can take place not only when you speak to your customer in person at the branch or the call center, but also online. No search engine in the world can read your customer’s mind, but by understanding your customer’s background and profile you can tune search relevance in such a way that your customer gets results that are most relevant and contextual. Profiles may be based on any measurable and relevant parameter, including: geographical location; most frequent type of transactions; demographics; type of accounts with your bank; and many other factors. Moreover, if you know your customer has just booked an air ticket to Colombo, why not offer her travel insurance, life insurance or a credit card with travel points? The more relevant your promotions and product offers, the higher the likelihood your customer will respond to them.
The online experience banks offer customers should be not only contextual but also easy and intuitive. A good search engine supports natural language processing, spelling correction, synonym expansion, lemmatization (e.g. searching for "good" will also produce "better" and "best") and auto-phrasing. Search-driven navigation allows your bank site’s visitors, customers and prospects to quickly browse site content and narrow their information gathering to focus on the task at hand, whether that be making a support request or signing up for a new service. Some companies are adopting the concept of "zero-term search," where users are presented with a special-purpose portal view keyed to a topic (e.g. retirement products) to encourage them to navigate to the desired results without ever entering a search term.
Finally, why not make your bank’s site a "destination portal" for many of your customer’s needs by adding external information from your global partners, industry associations or online community chat forums? That customer of yours going to Colombo may be interested in suggestions on hotels and restaurants or even in travel alerts for her destination. She will also appreciate currency converters, information on foreign exchange fees and ATM locations. Search federation enables banks to collect and aggregate content and data from other search services to present a one-stop-shop experience to the customer.
These are some of the ways to increase a bank site’s "stickiness" and positively impact customer loyalty.
Future Standard
The future of consumer banking will see the emergence of special portals that are extremely personalized and collaborative, that aggregate all critical information into one view, regardless of source, and that are attractive, context-sensitive, and easy to use—on whatever device or in whatever language is appropriate to the individual user. In other words, banks will increasingly focus strategic investments on designing and executing online and cross-channel experiences that are empowering for bank employees and enjoyable for bank customers.
FAST, a Microsoft® subsidiary, creates the real-time search solutions that are behind the scenes at the world’s best-known companies with the most demanding information challenges. FAST’s flexible and scalable integrated technology platform connects users, regardless of medium, to the relevant information they need. For more information, visit us at fastsearch.com/financialservices
1. Arthur Andersen
2. Usability Return on Investment, Jacob Nielsen, 2007