Your institution is likely collecting massive amounts of customer data—but how are you accessing and using that data?
Effective use of data can have an enormous impact on your institution, including increased wallet share, new organizational efficiencies, and new franchise value. Now that customers are virtually interacting with their banks more than ever, you have a wealth of data to mine for business intelligence. However, customer data doesn’t do you much good unless you can effectively collect, decipher, and implement the information.
Banking data analyst Kim Snyder joined Info-Pro for a recent webinar to explore the strategic use of customer data in banking and the specific tactics your institution can use to drive growth and efficiencies.
Use data to anticipate customer needs
By using the data to see what your customers need, you can strengthen your relationships even further and spur growth in your organization. With massive corporate banks ramping up their technology budgets to meet their customers’ needs, smaller institutions can leverage their data to compete for consumers’ trust online. Since community banks’ main advantage comes from their ability to offer a deeper level of personalization, this strategy can lead to higher attraction/retention rates and underpin a greater level of profitability across the board.
For example, by effectively analyzing your customer data, you have a better opportunity to successfully cross-sell your other paid offerings to clients who are more likely to be interested, driving revenue and increasing profitability. Furthermore, this data helps you mitigate risk by understanding your consumers’ behaviors. Your team can act quickly when a client is having an issue with their account or experiencing ongoing customer support issues. Lastly, by employing a top-down data strategy, every employee can more efficiently perform their duties with greater customization with easy access to relevant data.
However, the benefits of these massive data stores that community banks have access to can quickly become derailed with ineffective management of the information. The biggest obstacle many institutions faced when managing their data was siloed data with too many different sources. Along with outdated systems, ineffective data management can stifle even the best of strategies.
Implement an organization-wide strategy
To make your institutional data work for you, Snyder suggests outlining exactly what your data can do and how it can help your bank grow:
- Define how your data will help you meet your business goals and measure the bank’s success.
- Design how your organization will implement the data collection by analyzing current software and staffing capabilities.
Once your plan is in place, it’s time to allot resources, establish timelines and communicate this process to your entire team. This should be a top-down effort that can streamline the implementation of your new data-driven culture across your organization.
As an executive, it’s important to eliminate barriers to key data so that every team member can be set up for success, thus allowing them to do the same for your customers. Make this a full-team effort. Marketing, IT, human resources, and customer service representatives all need to be on board with your updated strategy.
Choose the right data points
Now that you’ve defined your strategy it’s time to find which data points make the biggest difference in terms of your bank’s ability to grow. Too much or irrelevant data can overwhelm even experienced professionals, which is why finding the right information and streamlining the process is imperative to the strategy’s success. Transformative data includes the most intimate pieces of information that you have available to make the biggest impact for your business.
By finding the right data points, you can transform your business in every area—from risk management to technological offerings and sales projections. Rather than having an overwhelming amount of data available, leveraging the key points that make a big difference can support every role across your organization.
Ongoing customer data management
In addition to this process, you’ll need effective data cleansing and governance systems to optimize this implementation. This helps you effectively collect important data and manage the information to ensure that you’re getting the points that you need every step of the way. With all of these to-do items, the team performing these tasks proves vital to the strategy’s success. Community banks can outsource the data to various companies or assemble an internal team to effectively manage this process. Either way, your data team will be paramount to the process.
An effective data strategy can transform your bank from top to bottom. Bringing you closer to your customers, helping you meet their needs, empowering your sales teams, and focusing your customer acquisition strategy, data utilization is the tool of the future. When you know how to use it, this data can underpin nearly all of your efforts, bringing a tailored, comprehensive approach to virtually all of your operations.
Find out more about how your data can set you up for success with Info-Pro. Contact us today.
