Personalize Customer Experiences in Financial Services
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain the importance of personalization in the financial services industry.
- Identify key roles that benefit from personalization.
- Describe the Financial Services Cloud data model.
- Explain the integration between Financial Services Cloud and Data Cloud.
- Explain how FlexCards and the Household API help to understand customers better.
Why Does Personalization Matter?
Imagine walking into a bank where everyone knows your name and understands your financial needs. Sounds great, right? That’s the power of personalization. Personalization is about customizing a product, service, or experience to fit an individual’s unique needs or preferences. It improves customer engagement, reduces costs, increases sales, and drives higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. And it’s essential in all customer journeys: onboarding new customers, financial planning, opening new accounts, delivering customer service, and more.
Take the example of a customer who frequently travels for work. They often find themselves in unfamiliar cities and struggle to locate in-network ATMs, leading to unnecessary fees. What if their bank could send them notifications about nearby in-network ATMs as soon as they arrive in a new city? Or consider a customer who tends to forget about upcoming bill payments. By analyzing their payment habits, the bank could send them timely reminders to help them avoid late fees. These personalized interactions can significantly enhance the experience for customers and strengthen their relationship with the bank.
Benefits for Employees
Personalization isn’t just a customer-facing initiative. It has far-reaching benefits for various roles within a financial services organization, helping teams deliver more effective solutions while streamlining internal operations. Let’s take a closer look at how it benefits key roles.
- Business leaders can reduce costs and grow revenue by rationalizing data and simplifying the technology architecture.
- Bankers can better manage customer spending, help customers pay off debt, and review significant purchases.
- Using key personalized data, wealth managers can help customers achieve their long-term goals, such as retirement planning and growing generational wealth.
- Marketers can use personalization to better target and engage customers, enhancing customer acquisition and retention.
So we know that personalization is great for both customers and employees. But how do we achieve it? Financial institutions need the right solution to deliver personalized experiences. This is where Salesforce Data Cloud comes in. Data Cloud for Financial Services Cloud gives teams the tools they need to create intelligent, personalized customer experiences.
Data Model Makes It Easier
To have a unified view of their customers, financial institutions must connect and integrate customer data. Data Cloud for Financial Services Cloud enables you to unify and activate different kinds of data, such as interaction, behavioral, and transactional data.
The Financial Services Cloud data model is built on the Salesforce Platform and includes a Financial Accounts object for customer financial holdings. Additionally, other Financial Services Cloud objects store data about the relationships between a financial account, the household, financial goals, and so on. This data model makes it much easier to connect Financial Services Cloud with Data Cloud. So how do you integrate Financial Services Cloud with Data Cloud? Let’s find out.
Integrate Financial Services Cloud with Data Cloud
Data Cloud for Financial Services Cloud includes a data kit with prebuilt data mappings and streams for effective data integration. These data mappings relate to the Financial Services Cloud bundle for the Salesforce CRM connector. You can add to or customize the data mappings. Data Cloud takes in data from multiple sources and harmonizes it into a model so you can see and understand customer activity and needs.
But that’s not all. The integration also enables bankers to offer personalized advice to customers, making their interactions more insightful and engaging.
Calculate and Visualise Insights
To serve your customers better, you need to turn customer data into actionable insights. Financial Services Cloud for Data Cloud provides predefined Calculated Insights for common financial services solutions and FlexCards to visualize calculated insights. You can visualize customer metrics such as monthly expenses and net worth for deeper financial insights.
Let’s go over a couple of FlexCards: Cash Flow Summary FlexCard and Cash Flow by Category FlexCard.
The Cash Flow Summary FlexCard shows a customer’s cash flow trends over a selected time frame and highlights periods of cash flow surplus and deficit. A bar graph shows a month-by-month breakdown of your customer’s total income and expenses.
The Cash Flow by Category FlexCard shows the customer’s income and expenses for the previous month grouped by category. A pie chart and list help you quickly identify top income and expenditure categories.
Gather Household Details
With Financial Services Cloud for Data Cloud, you get insights into not only individual customers but also customer households. Using the Household API, set up Connect API calls to gather critical details such as members, financial accounts, holdings, assets, and liabilities. When you call the endpoint, your financial planning tool analyzes the data from the Connect API and provides a consolidated financial view of your customers. With this summary of household information, you can deliver meaningful and personalized financial planning advice to your customers.
Wrap Up
Personalized financial engagement enhances customer experiences with data-driven insights. And it’s great for bankers and financial analysts too! Connect with your Salesforce admin and team to explore how personalization can benefit your organization.