Driving an Improved Customer Experience for Financial Services

The financial services industry has seen a huge acceleration of digital strategies in the wake of COVID-19, in an attempt to meet consumer needs and ensure business continuity. 

Since the onset of the pandemic, more than 50% of customers have switched from in-person to digital financial services – a trend that’s likely to become permanent in an increasingly digital era.

With digital transformation efforts having made significant progress, we are starting to see a shift in focus from organisations concerned with their ability to deliver digital services to how they deliver these services for optimal customer experience.

The benefits of focusing on customer experience (CX) are now widely understood. In contrast to a 2017 report that found only 37% of financial services organisations had a formal CX plan, a recent study by Microsoft found most financial services businesses are already using, or plan to use, digital CX technologies.

In the financial services sector, rewards for customer-centricity range from positive reviews and organic referrals, to securing higher market share and a greater ability to upsell or cross-sell complementary products and services.

CX Challenges Facing the Financial Services Industry

While other industries are powering ahead with cutting edge AI-powered customer data platforms, there are several factors impeding the financial services industry from realising its potential.

The first is compliance. Data plays a crucial role in improving CX because it allows for the delivery of personalised service through a deeper understanding of a customer’s wants and needs. With the financial services industry subject to heavy regulations, particularly due to the sheer volume of sensitive and personally identifiable information (PII), data transformation efforts are understandably more difficult. Essentially, strong governance practices must be fully integrated into any data solutions to ensure compliance.

Another key challenge is data integration and quality. Data is only useful if it’s accurate, making data cleansing and validation essential to ensure outputs can be trusted.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all though is the integration of data across typically highly siloed business units.

For example, a bank will have customer data available from their mobile app, in-person banking services, and self-service applications. To deliver a personalised and seamless omnichannel customer experience, the business needs to be able to draw data from all these touchpoints. This enables the creation of a 360-degree customer view, which is essential to be able to deliver the level of personalisation most customers expect.

When a financial services business can achieve a complete view of their customer, they can essentially become “partners for life,” supporting the customer through their entire financial journey – from establishing their first account, to applying for their first credit card, buying their first home, making wise investments, and planning for retirement.  

Partnerships that Provide Solutions 

Microsoft and Informatica have worked together for many years to provide game-changing solutions for our customers.

For financial services companies struggling to accelerate their CX efforts due to data management issues, we have developed an Enterprise Accelerator that helps to rapidly discover and deliver additional data sources to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to solve these key challenges.

Our solution empowers businesses to reap the benefits of the AI-powered platform across sales, service, and marketing so they can personalise experiences at scale.

Some of the key capabilities include:

1. Accelerated customer data sourcing – Connect and fetch data from disparate sources for processing of customer-related data assets. Informatica technologies are 90% faster in discovering the right customer data assets for integration, which addresses the fundamental pain point of finding and extracting relevant customer data assets to drive CX.  
2. Cleansed, enriched, and assured data quality – Informatica’s AI engine CLAIRE can cleanse, enrich, and establish high data quality while demonstrating strong governance across data lineage, PII, compliance, and privacy.
3. Actionable insights – Our “Common Data Model Connectivity” for Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 applications transform customer data assets so Dynamics 365 applications can generate insights seamlessly.

 To learn more about how your financial services organisation can benefit from the Informatica Enterprise Accelerator and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, watch the demo here.