The Banking Customer Experience – How to Start Tracking Omnichannel Customer Journey of Your Clients

Banking customers have grown accustomed to the omnichannel convenience – the ability to start a process on a mobile app, then move to desktop, and finish the whole procedure at a local branch. Banks should then monitor the customer experience of their e-banking and m-banking services to make sure that hopping from one device to another their customers are used to is as seamless as possible.

As you can see in the last year’s ‘The Nielsen Mobile Shopping, Banking and Payment Survey Q1, 2016′, nearly half of banking clients checked an account balance or made transaction on their mobile device in the past six months, and 42% paid a bill.

What’s more, Forrester – one of the most influential research and advisory firms – predicts that by the end of 2017 nearly 108 million customers in the United States alone will have used mobile banking.

However, it turns out that digital banking customer experience (especially in the case of m-banking services) can be their real Achilles’ heel. A recent study carried out by Jumio showed that more than 85% of m-banking users are dissatisfied with their ability to access financial services on their mobile devices.

Over 85% of m-banking users are dissatisfied with their ability to access financial services on their mobile devices.

This state of affairs may be conditioned by a number of factors. Most importantly, due to the amount of legal restrictions imposed on them, banks tend to be one of the slowest adopters of the digital tools, including data analytics tools. In order not to be doomed to operate on pure assumptions, banks need to go the extra mile to provide sufficient security to the data they collect.

With the right web analytics setup and approach to data privacy, banks are able to capture valuable information about their customers, which opens up avenues for making effective improvements and innovations to their products.

By recreating the whole customer journey of their clients, banks can not only improve client satisfaction, but also gain competitive advantage and outrun other banking institutions that haven’t recognized the potential of web analytics data.

The customer journey & banking

Due to its vast selection of reports and features, web analytics provides banks with an exhaustive overview on every touchpoint their (prospective) customers use to connect with the bank.

Below, for your convenience, we pair every stage of the customer journey in banking with the most valuable types of web analytics reports for banks to exploit:

1. Awareness stage

At this stage you want to know how prospects have learned about your bank and where they have come from. The following types of reports will prove useful:

• Reports on traffic sources – showing where your bank’s customers begin their journey with your brand and how they learn about your bank.
• Online campaigns reports – showing the effectiveness of your marketing department in building brand awareness among potential customers.
• Aggregated reports – showing where new visitors enter your bank’s website
• User-level reports– capturing new visitors’ first touchpoints with your brand

2. Consideration stage

At this stage of a banking customer journey it’s vital to single out the first-time visitors from the recurring visitors. And also measure which parts of your bank’s website or application have driven their attention.

This will let you focus your efforts on the consumers actively considering buying your products. At this point, you also need to improve or personalize the content on your bank’s website to be able to appeal to the users. The following types of reports will prove useful:

• User-centric reporting – serves to analyze the returning visitors segment on a more individual basis and to uncover more touchpoints through which the customers research your brand
• Reports on file downloads & outbound links clicks – show which types of content are most popular among the visitors to your bank’s website
• Content & event reporting – to track your bank’s customer touchpoints and the way the users interact with the content on your website or m-banking application

3. Conversion

In this phase it’s important to capture the final touchpoints before the conversion. This way you’ll be able to assess which channels contributed the most to the overall success. The following reports may come in handy:

• Click path reports – to uncover unexpected paths your users take to convert
• Advanced segmentation – to filter out converting users
• Conversion attribution – to answer the most important questions about the effectiveness of your bank’s multichannel marketing endeavors

4. Retention

The retention stage deals with the visitors who have become your bank’s customers and sometimes need your guidance. To improve their experience at this stage of the journey you want to take advantage of:

• Custom variables & dimensions – these will help you in further segmentation of your clients (they provide you with additional information on your bank’s customers to enrich your visitor-level reports)
• Analytics for m-banking – this will let you track the behavior of users who use your m-banking services on their smartphones or tablets

Ok, it all sounds good. But how to make it work?

Right now you may not have sufficient knowledge on how to put all these reports and features to work, not to mention the knowledge to choose the right analytics tool that will let you comply with strict banking regulations.

In our latest guide 6 Steps to Start Tracking Customer Journey Across Channels in e-Banking and m-Banking we outline the process of implementing digital analytics in banking.

Below you can read a brief recapitulation of the steps to take in order to start tracking the customer journey in banking:

1. Set your goals and pair them with accurate KPIs

Your first challenge will be to set accurate goals for your e-banking or m-banking and choose the right KPIs to measure their success. It’s extremely important to not disregard this step. Otherwise, you won’t be able to assess the effectiveness of your efforts.

Remember to set the KPIs that are not directly connected to your financial objectives. It goes without saying that every marketing activity you perform should somehow serve the boost of revenue. However, in the case of banking customer journey, KPIs should revolve around customer satisfaction, not purely financial metrics.

In our guide you’ll find the most dependable heuristics that will help you measure the success of your activities on every step of the customer journey in banking. They’ll also help you connect the dots between every touchpoint between your clients and the bank.

2. Review the demand for data against banking privacy regulations and policies

Once your KPIs are set, it’s time to evaluate, if you’re legally allowed to collect all the data.

Banking is one of the most highly-regulated industries. Make sure you adhere to the regulatory strictures concerning user data collection and processing. When planning your e-banking and m-banking customer journey tracking, bear in mind:

• Your internal data privacy policies
• The regulations of countries you operate in
• International laws concerning data privacy

In our ebook, we elaborate on the issue of data privacy regulations and discuss the most important ones that have impact on the way banks collect and process their customer data.

3. Choose the right tool to track your e-banking and m-banking

There are many factors to take into consideration when looking for a web analytics tool suitable for your organization. These could be: price, features, or customer support service provided by the vendor. In the case of banking, though, data privacy should always be treated as a top priority.

With the information gathered in our guide, you’ll discover how to comply with the mandatory banking regulations without trading off your marketing effectiveness and the digital banking customer experience.

4. Prepare a Solution Design for your chosen analytics tool

The next step is creating a comprehensive documentation of everything you want to track with your tool, as well as an implementation of the tool itself.

The whole process will differ, depending on which web analytics vendor you’ve chosen. In the case of Piwik PRO the implementation and document creation is typically on the vendor’s end. But the processed can also be carried out by your internal team or dedicated external agency, depending on your bank’s internal policies.

In this phase of the process you need to create a documentation for your web analytics setup. It is definitely one of the most important steps in this journey. The document will serve you for a long time, so it’s crucial to get it right.

With our guide, you’ll learn the important rules of creating future-proof analytical documentation.

5. Implement the tool and test it

Testing is a critical component of every implementation. Digital analytics requires testing to ensure that all the tags are implemented correctly, events fire when they should, and that data appears within the interface as expected.

Thanks to our guide, you’ll learn a couple of important tips on how to make this step less effortful.

6. Set up reporting

In the case of reporting, there are at least two options: taking advantage of your web analytics solution or using a separate visualization tool. At this stage, you also have to define the shape of reports you’ll pass to particular stakeholders. In our guide, we talk you through this step and give you valuable resources on the subject.

The customer experience & banking – concluding

All the information presented above is only a sneak peek of the contents of the actual guide. So if you want to delve deeper into all the important details of creating reliable visualization of the customer journey in m-banking and e-banking, we encourage you to download our 6 Steps to Start Tracking Customer Journey Across Channels in e-Banking and m-Banking.

If you have any doubts and queries, feel welcome to contact us anytime. We’d be happy to fill you in on the subject!