A Perficient colleague in our Portals and Social practice, Brendon Jones, posted a blog yesterday, “Re-energizing the retail banking experience” which talked about the shift in retail banking towards the use of social technologies to deliver value in mobile services for money management. As the McKinsey Quarterly source he mentioned referenced, social networks have become mainstream with consumers. With that, the pace of social technology adoption by companies has started to accelerate. Non-banks like Moven and Simple, as well as a number of European service providers have launched more “socially integrated” mobile banking applications in the past few years. However, most of these products (and the financial services industry as a whole) have only scratched the surface with building functionality into the customer experience to engage with customers and pinpoint the ROI of mobile banking.
Goals of Social Technologies in Financial Services
A number of people in banking I talk to have shared some of their top strategic priorities for next year. At the top of everyone’s list is retooling, reinventing and re-energizing the customer experience in financial service. We’re seeing financial institutions start to innovate in new ways towards “connected banking” solutions and social features that:
- explore the omni-channel banking model
- deliver more personalized experiences and customer service
- measure customer sentiment
- optimize cross-channel marketing and sales goals
- encourage collaboration and enterprise productivity
- reduce friction in customer relationships
- differentiate the bank from the competition
Social selling and bringing the account opening process to a social network allows a bank to be at the center of a customer’s money management decisions. A great success story comes from Navy Federal Credit Union. Another area where social can be integrated is mobile personal finance management (PFM) with the help of gamification. Moven integrates their MoneyPath application with a customer’s Facebook timeline for greater financial awareness. The goal of ‘Facebook banking’ is to be a part of the personal dialogues customers have with features like P2P social payments, share financial goals, and provide the added convenience to access account information (i.e. ING Direct ). It will be interesting to see if we see more U.S. banks integrate the social channel in the near future. The possibilities for re-energizing the retail banking experience are endless as banks bring together portals, web content management (WCM) technologies, mobile, and social collaboration tools for multiple purposes.
Social’s Impact on Internal Collaboration
Organizations can use tools like Yammer to socialize content internally, communicate more easily with peers, and more quickly get answers to questions from others. Just imagine, by using a social platform and portal solution financial marketers could share the vast amounts of content produced on a daily basis without having to move to external channels. According to the McKinsey survey, the potential benefit from improved productivity (as a percentage of revenue) is highest in retail banking. The survey also showed that retail banking ranked 3rd as an industry to benefit in the area of collaboration.
I personally feel like there is so much room for growth in banking to make social a part of an omni-channel banking strategy by adding “utility” to a mobile or web experience. Whether Facebook will stand the test of time as a long-term platform I don’t know. However, I feel there are elements of social that allow companies to connect via a platform to engage with customers and will help banks re-imagine the future of banking. Internally, financial institutions can benefit greatly from implementing social platforms to improve productivity, encourage collaboration and communication, and bring down the data and personnel silos that exist in today’s banking world. As these walls come down and data vaults are opened, enterprise technologies for Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM) will extend value in CRM solutions, enable new digital marketing capabilities, and fuel the customer experience that will truly re-energize the retail banking experience.
