Ctrl-Alt-Del Your Old Ways: Transformation With Drift and State Street

I recently had the opportunity to be a guest speaker in the webinar, “Maximizing Marketing Efforts, the Benefits of Personalizing Online Experience” presented by B2B marketing zone and sponsored by Drift. We covered a lot of great topics (which you can check out here), but I’ve condensed some of the key points into this article. 

What shifts have you noticed in the ways in which your clients interact or want to interact with businesses?

The key takeaway is the shift in communication methods due to the pandemic. Before the pandemic, the industry relied heavily on in-person interactions, especially for sales teams. However, with the pandemic, virtual communication became the norm for everyone, including sales teams. Now, as we transition back to in-person interactions, virtual communication remains widely accepted and is no longer a faux pas. Financial services firms had to quickly shift to virtual communication during the pandemic, which accelerated their digital transformation efforts. Now, the industry is trying to determine what the new normal will look like in terms of communication methods and client relationships. It is likely that this will vary on a client-by-client basis.

How can Financial Services make their website experience better?

Building a solid data and measurement system is crucial for delivering a positive website experience to clients. Data is essential in understanding who is visiting the website, what their role is within their organization, and what information they are seeking. By leveraging 3rd party data, businesses can deliver an experience that quickly serves the information clients are seeking and better target campaigns and content based on what is already known about them. Success in delivering a positive website experience is achieved by truly understanding who the clients are and why they are visiting and where they are in their journey.

Why is it important that businesses humanize the online financial services experience?

1. The pandemic has made many services feel commoditized, including financial services, and has highlighted the need for more personalized and human-centric experiences.
2. “The average B2B buyer interacts with 27 different touchpoints before making a decision, and by 2025, 88% of those interactions will be digital, making it essential for firms to stand out and deliver unique value. “ Lee Zucker – Drift
3. To achieve this, financial services firms need to invest in tools and strategies that help them better understand and engage with their prospects and customers, and to provide personal touches that make the digital experience feel more human, such as live chat or personalized content.

How should the financial services websites adjust?

Personalization is key to creating a good website. It’s not just about using the customer’s name, but also anticipating their needs and helping them accomplish what’s on their mind.

• Using real customer stories and testimonials to show how their services have helped actual people.
• Incorporating employee profiles and photos to showcase the people behind the brand.
• Creating content that speaks directly to the customer’s needs, concerns, and pain points.
• Providing personalized recommendations and advice based on the customer’s unique situation.
• Using a conversational tone in the website’s copy to make it feel more like a conversation than a sales pitch.
• Offering interactive tools, such as calculators or quizzes, that allow customers to engage with the website in a more meaningful way.
• Providing clear and easy-to-understand explanations of financial concepts and products to demystify the often complex world of finance.
• Overall, the goal should be to create a website that feels approachable, trustworthy, and helpful, rather than cold and impersonal.

How will automation enhance the digital experience?

• Efficiency: Automation can streamline and speed up routine processes such as account opening, loan applications, and customer service inquiries. This can reduce wait times, minimize errors, and free up staff to focus on more complex tasks. “Implementing live chat has significantly decreased sales support inbox questions.Prior to launching chat, the sales support team was polled on what they spend the most time on addressing from clients and customers to tailor automated conversations. The automation process through bots saves time and effort in servicing clients and qualifying incoming chat wrap requests,” Kate Marx – State Street.
• Personalization: Automation can use data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize customer interactions, offer targeted product recommendations, and provide financial advice based on individual needs and preferences. “I’ve seen people use Adobe target, for example, and leverage different types of data on the back end to understand which events do these customers like? Where have they shown up, what’s important to them? And then driving relevant like flyout’s on the website experience to create an easy automated registration for them that makes sense,” Tara Quehl – Demandbase.
• Accessibility: Automation can make financial services more accessible to a wider range of people by providing online and mobile banking options, virtual financial advisors, and digital financial education resources.
• Security: Automation can improve security by detecting and preventing fraud, monitoring transactions in real-time, and using biometric authentication to verify customer identity.
• Cost-effectiveness: Automation can reduce costs by minimizing the need for physical infrastructure, such as bank branches, and optimizing resource allocation based on real-time data.

Overall, automation can enhance the financial services digital experience by making it faster, more personalized, accessible, secure, and cost-effective.

What’s next?

The pandemic changed the B2B landscape irrevocably, and financial services are beginning to have to evaluate their methods of communication on a client-by-client basis. In a time where buyers are doing more and more of their research online, it’s important to optimize those platforms to the max. 

If implementing things like personalization and automation seem daunting, don’t worry! There are lots of tools out there that can help you digitally transform headache-free. At Demandbase, we proudly offer one such tool with features custom-built for financial services. You can find out more here and even take a self-guided tour to see how we enable digital transformation at all levels.