How to accelerate customer acquisition at banks and financial firms

While banks and financial organizations pride themselves on being data-driven, they often only use one type of data. Quantitative data and analytics tools have been relied on to inform corporate strategies for many years. Some would even consider them foundational for decision-making. At all levels of a business, especially in the boardroom, it’s easy to understand quantitative performance metrics and tie them to ROI.

NPS and survey data tell you what's happening, not why

All too often, qualitative data isn’t given the same level of importance. Qualitative data includes customer insights, feedback, and observations from interviews and usability tests, to name a few. The value of this kind of data is perceived as more difficult to quantify and attribute to ROI, which is the reason why it remains underutilized today. In the past, qualitative data was also incredibly time-consuming and expensive, making it rare to come by. However, the value that qualitative data brings is immense. Qualitative data allows for a deeper analysis of customers' thoughts and perspectives through probing questions that enhance an organization’s knowledge, understanding, and empathy for its customers. You can understand how customers think. You can find out things like why they decided to purchase or not purchase a product and whether or not they find your product valuable. 

The major limitation of only using quantitative data, like survey results and NPS, is that while it can tell you something is happening, it can’t tell you why it’s happening or what’s the solution. 

Quantitative data focuses on the past

Additionally, these are historical data points. Quantitative metrics can indeed shed light on customer satisfaction, but they aren’t forward-looking. By the time they hit your desk, the poor customer experience has already occurred. Any effort on your part to triage the situation is reactionary, which makes quantitative data difficult to leverage when trying to drive innovation.

As markets continue to change rapidly, making decisions based on purely historical data without additional insight into what people expect is risky. Predicting the future based on what has happened in the past won’t work anymore. It’s insufficient to make decisions and differentiate your organization from the competition. 

Customers are not fixed data points. So we can’t use static data points to understand and connect with them. Using data is, however, still critical. 

According to McKinsey, the fight for customer relationships has moved to a new terrain unfamiliar to banks. Many incumbents are ill-equipped to defend market share on the digital battlefield as niche players siphon off smaller customer segments. The secret to survival is that banks need to rearticulate their value using the power of customer experience and learn how to create value through data. 

Banks and large financial organizations should aspire to offer a customer experience similar to tech companies. After all, consumers compare experiences to the best ones they've ever had. Companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Disney constantly raise the bar for great digital and in-person experiences, and the bar eventually becomes the baseline for what consumers expect.  

This means using quantitative and qualitative data for hyper-personalization and stronger customer engagement, implementing agile operating models to respond rapidly to changing markets and customer preferences, and speeding up innovation. 

Now that we’ve covered why you should use qualitative data alongside the quantitative data that you’ve traditionally relied on, let's talk about how to do this. While getting qualitative data was expensive and time-consuming in the past, connecting directly with customers can be done quickly and easily with the use of an insight platform. 

Insight platforms allow you to engage with real people as they use your product, mobile app, services, and more. With access to an insight platform, teams throughout your organization gain a vivid, first-person understanding of what it’s like to be your customer. They can share customer insight videos across the organization. This makes it easier to achieve cross-functional alignment around your customers' needs. 

With fast access to real people speaking their unique perspectives, banks and financial institutions can: 

• Ground business decisions in the voice of the customer to reduce customer acquisition costs
• Align front-end and back-end teams around customer needs to speed up onboarding
• Test throughout the customer journey to turn active customers into loyal advocates

Through the UserTesting Human Insight Platform, anyone in an organization can easily get a vivid, first-person understanding of any experience and build greater customer empathy.

Operationalize customer empathy cross-functionally

If using qualitative data is new to your team, getting a high ROI on your customer insight investment may take a little practice, but stick to these key steps, and you'll quickly start to see results: 

1. Get leadership fully on board to facilitate the adoption
2. Give cross-functional teams direct access to customers via an insight platform
3. Have managers develop a plan for how they want to incorporate customer empathy into their current processes 
4. Share customer feedback throughout the organization
5. Promote a customer-centric culture

It’s doubtful that one team owns every step of the customer journey at your organization. Yet, connecting with customers frequently and consistently throughout their journey is key to optimizing your experience to foster trust. 

So, let’s walk through common steps in the customer journey for banks and large financial organizations. This will help you understand how the qualitative data that an insight platform provides can be leveraged at every stage of the customer journey. 

Customer acquisition

Acquiring customers is costly. The banking industry's average customer acquisition cost (CAC) is above $300, and it’s risen since COVID-19. That’s why financial organizations need to do more pre and post-click to optimize their efforts. 

With an insight platform, customer acquisition decisions move from opinion-based to customer-informed. Digital marketing teams can test their messaging with customers before they launch. Digital product and experience teams can see if what they’re planning to offer is actually valuable to customers before they invest budget and resources into developing it.

Teams can discover opportunities to grow by working with unbanked and underbanked segments and targeting them with tailored offers based on their unique needs. 

A great option for digital teams is to start by using templates. UserTesting templates are layouts designed by qualitative research experts, complete with pre-written tasks and questions, so that non-research teams can quickly get the answers they need. Templates can be used as-is to guide you—or customized to fit your needs. We offer one for almost any kind of focus, whether you're prioritizing persona-based discovery, website evaluation, or mobile app evaluation, to name a few. 

Templates to get started

• Persona characteristics - Bring your customer personas to life with insight into their attitude and behavior
• Value proposition validation - Test your value proposition with insights from your target customer

How Everypaw by Cardif Pinnacle uses human insight to refine TV campaigns

Front-end customer onboarding

A great onboarding experience reinforces trust in your organization. According to Jim Marous, onboarding should feel like a single process, no matter how many channels are used. Customers expect premium digital experiences to 

• Be consistent across multiple channels
• Avoid repeatedly asking for the same information
• Function in near real-time with accuracy
• Keep them informed and provide process transparency 

Knowing that your onboarding process could be improved differs from watching customers struggle with a task. It’s hard to forget a painful experience when you see it yourself. 

Fixing painful experiences before they reach your customers and potential customers has a direct impact on growth. Think about all the business being left on the table with 60% of prospective banking customers dropping off during onboarding, and 43% of those with a low onboarding satisfaction score either “definitely or probably” switching banks as a result. Qualitative data helps you find out why. This is what makes empathy actionable.

Watching videos of customers going through your onboarding process gives you instant visibility into where the friction lies. Easily pinpoint processes and tasks that need streamlining. Whether a mom of three is struggling to set up a new account or a grandparent wants to transfer funds to their grandchild, your teams can quickly identify these frustrations and escalate the priority by sharing insight videos with leadership. Since people aren’t numbers, they turn static data points into real stories that are easy to remember and communicate to others.

To give you an idea of what video-based customer feedback looks like, we ran a quick test to ask bank customers what their banks could do differently to improve their life greatly. Here's what they said: 

Templates to get started

• Customer journey - Understand how customers engage with your offerings across multiple touchpoints
• Messaging comprehension - Find out if audiences understand what you’re saying

How Wise improves its mobile app and website based on customer feedback