The customer journey is no longer linear. Customers are moving easily between various sales channels including online, mobile, telephone and in-person meetings and seek a seamless and singular experience as they switch channels. Today, a multichannel environment offers convenience and accessibility to the customer but it doesn’t necessarily offer a seamless and unified experience throughout the entire customer journey.
Although banks have embraced a multi-channel strategy where customers are able to research and buy financial products through multiple channels, including the branch, online, and customer service, many banks have yet to embrace a true omnichannel strategy. Omnichannel takes multichannel to the next step and delivers a very targeted and personalized buying experience that enables prospects to interact with your brand on any channel they choose as well as seamlessly transition across channels.
Today, many banks are using behavioral, demographic, and historical analytics to personalize the customer experience. They are tracking web statistics and servicing up content and offers based on what prospects are looking at on the web site without direct knowledge of the financial needs of the customer. The problem with this is that many bank web sites have more than 100 products and up to 2000 web pages so it may take a while for a prospect to find what they are really looking for.
True personalization can only begin when the bank is able to capture the prospect’s current financial and banking needs and this should be done early on in the buying journey. From what we have seen over the past few years, the customer journey is starting online and banks need an easy and consistent way to capture the prospect’s needs, as if they were in the branch meeting face to face, to provide a personalized 1:1 service throughout the entire customer journey.
There are two ways to capture this information today. The first is to have a direct conversation with the prospect either in–person, through video chat or on the telephone. The second is to use Intelligent Guided Selling.
What is Intelligent Guided Selling? It is a smart virtual banker that solicits information online from a prospective customer inquiring about their current financial needs. It asks 4 to 7 questions learning and understanding as it goes, to then guide the prospect to the appropriate product recommendations based on need and more importantly, eligibility.
As the customer moves from channel to channel, the data from the guide moves with them and intelligently delivers the most relevant content and consistent recommendation.
Personalization can be taken a step further. Offerings such as mortgages and wealth management require deep expertise during the sales process. To make it easy for prospects to gain more information, banks can also integrate live chat allowing customers to access bank product-specific expertise instantly which enriches customer interactions and advances the customer experience. With live chat no matter which channel the customer is engaging, the customer is able to directly access the expert they require.
Guided selling is the only way for banks to realize the true value of omnichannel and it is the only way for banks to provide a unified customer experience.
Ignite Sales offers a specialized guided selling solution specifically designed for the banking industry. It has been proven to help banks gain
- 200% Increased wallet share per customer
- Sell 6-8 products at the point-of-sales
- Create 10X greater lead flow
- Provide 250% average conversion rate of online leads.
To learn more, please contact us here.
