Customized financial services have become the standard for corporate and retail banking clients, but this wasn’t the case just a few decades ago. To offer personalized experiences, a bank must first have a repository of information regarding its clients and the means to quickly access such files, analyze them, and update them every time the bank interacts with customers. Without the technology to support these functionalities, personalized services were the exception rather than the rule.
Offering Customized Payment Solutions on a Global Scale
The ongoing digital revolution, the rise of future-ready information architecture, and the use of big data, among many other innovations, have allowed financial services providers to keep and use detailed information about each of their customers with ease. The attitude toward data privacy is also changing.
While not a lot of people were comfortable with the idea of sharing personal data with corporate entities in the past, recent publications have revealed that more and more consumers are willing to share their data with their service providers if this will enable them to enjoy personalized services in return. Being able to barter data with their customers this way gives financial organizations the capability to fine-tune their products and services across different geographic, cultural, and marketing constraints, even down to the personal level.
These days, many corporate and retail customers access payment processing solutions through smart devices. Despite the lack of face-to-face interaction, the bank and its customers are still able to get direct feedback from each other through the banking application. The level of personalization and direct assistance offered by banks through innovative mobile and digital banking applications assures customers that their opinions are heard and that their banks are striving to provide them with services that will seamlessly respond to their most pressing financial needs.
Also read: Top 10 International Payment Gateways for Business
Paving the Way for Personalized Financial Services and Customer Experiences
Building a payment processing platform that responds well to the needs of its users is a significant investment, but it’s far from impossible. A little less than a decade ago, Payoneer endeavored to provide its global clientele–which is mostly made up of freelancers and small business owners–with a borderless payment transfer platform that comes with personalized customer service. However, offering personalized responses to more than 5,000 daily inquiries proved to be a daunting task for the company’s 30-strong customer care team.
Then, in 2014, Payoneer partnered with digital solutions provider Oracle to design a system that delivers customized interactions to customers that speak different languages and are based in different countries. Using integrated marketing and intelligence data as well as customer profiles, Oracle came up with a customer service system that matched inquiries with customer service representatives who are best equipped to answer them. Payoneer’s clients submitted their questions through email, and Oracle used the system it developed to find the customer service agent who has the necessary expertise in the topic and also uses the client’s preferred language.
Using the information collected from earlier engagements, the said customer service system was eventually able to automatically send replies to routine questions. Complicated inquiries, however, were filtered using custom business rules, and these were forwarded to customer service agents with the right specialization and language skills. The efficient workflow designed and implemented by Oracle enabled Payoneer to easily and quickly respond to thousands of different service scenarios, offer localized step-by-step instructions for troubleshooting common issues, and set up FAQs and other customer resources in multiple languages.
Also read: Why Importance of Customer Experience with Customer Service
Using Customer Data to Design Better Financial Products and Services
On top of offering customized responses to questions, banks and other financial organizations can also use customer data and feedback to come up with products and services that are better suited for the particular needs of their clients. This can be done by gathering data on how customers are using the financial app, determining the demographic that is best served by a particular program or even sending surveys that would reveal what customers deem to be the limitations and advantages of the application and the products offered by a financial organization.
To entice more users to participate, it’s an option for financial institutions to incentivize their customers by offering them exclusive perks. The data collected from these interactions can help financial services providers design products and programs from scratch, implement improvements in existing products and platforms, and keep a close eye on the trends that will affect the industry in the near future.
The financial industry is in the midst of a great transformation, and disruptive technologies and trends will continue to emerge one after another in the coming years. It’s imperative for financial services providers to not only build a good relationship with their clients but also to maximize the current technologies that will allow them to do so. Investing in tools and systems that are made to improve customer experience, interaction, and data management today will prove to be an essential step for financial institutions that are themselves aiming to disrupt the industry.
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