The Map to Digital Banking Success is Hidden in Plain Sight

Get our take on Forrester’s July 2018 report, “Assess Your Digital Banking Capabilities” and download your complimentary copy (available until 11/21/18) in this post.

---

While many banks have raised their digital maturity, few are yet digital masters. This is our first key takeaway from Assess Your Digital Banking Capabilities written by Aurelie L'Hostis for Forrester. To change this, L’Hostis writes, digital banking leaders need to help their firms overhaul:

• Digital Customer Experience: To stay relevant to customers, digital banks must deliver useful and usable services that exceed current expectations and anticipate future needs to improve financial well-being.

• Digital Capabilities: Banks uses these capabilities to win, serve, and retain customers across touchpoints.  The ability to generate a mortgage quotation, or engage customers with personalized messages fit here.

• Digital Competencies: Strategy, structure, culture, talent, and technology; these are the things every bank must develop to drive lasting digital transformation and realize their digital business vision.

To begin the transformation, it’s essential that banks take a hard look in the mirror and ask tough questions about what they’re good at — and what they need to be better at.

Map your Digital Capabilities to the Customer Journey

According to L’Hostis, ”The age of the customer demands that you align your digital capabilities with the customer life cycle. You should plan for cross-touchpoint behavior by designing processes that make it easy for customers to switch between touchpoints.”

Start by mapping your bank’s digital capabilities onto the customer life cycle. Avoid the pitfalls of focusing on internal priorities (like customer acquisition) or single touch points (like a mobile app or a contact center application). As the Forrester report states: “Each stage of the life cycle comes with specific customer needs and so requires a different set of digital capabilities to respond to these.”

Related Blog Post: 3 Customer Engagement Opportunities Banks Can’t Afford to Ignore

L’Hostis notes, “The purchase journey often starts well before customers identify the financial product they need — such as when they begin searching for a house or a new car. Leading banks engage prospects early in the purchase cycle … [then] use lead management to help customers progress.”

A few examples from Assess Your Digital Banking Capabilities of how market leading banks around the world create and deliver digital campaigns:

• SunTrust offers onUp, a gamified financial well-being program, to engage customers and educate on key financial questions;
• Barclays in the UK offers the Homeowner mobile app to help house hunters search for properties, navigate home-buying process, and find a mortgage specialist;
• OCBC Bank in Singapore created a marketing chatbot to accelerate digital home loan sales; and
• mBank in Poland let customers and prospects speak to agents through video banking.

What each of these digital solutions have in common is that they make things faster and easier for customers, while at once being more personalized and responsive. Delivering these experiences is a product of studiously crafting digital competencies and capabilities.

3 Keys to Improving Digital Banking Capabilities Now

Assess Your Digital Banking Capabilities offers several recommendations for banks that wish to improve digital banking experiences, capabilities, and competencies. Here are some of our takeaways from these recommendations.

1) Partner with architecture firms: If you aren’t aware of your architecture capability maps, it is probably because they aren’t being used effectively — so seek them out and help champion a common business technology language to pin your digital vision to;  

2) Build a big map: To provide a thorough view on the bank’s digital capabilities and start breaking down channel and product silos, create and use digital capability maps together with colleagues responsible for branches and contact centers; and

3) Optimize journeys, not touchpoints: Customers often use a mix of touchpoints, such as your website combined with your contact center, during a single journey, and you need to help them switch between them. Orchestrating a seamless cross-touchpoint journey requires marketing mix, attribution models, data sharing processes, and analytics.

To assess your own bank’s level of digital maturity, take the Digital Banking Maturity Assessment, included in the Forrester research report. It will help you understand the core information required to go from offering limited digital services to exploring emerging technologies (AI, chatbots, and more) that will improve customer experience, and drive operational excellence across your business.

Get Forrester’s additional recommendations in the report — download your complimentary copy today; available until 11/21/18.