Unleashing the Power of Digital Customer Experience

During CIM’s Financial Services Marketing Leaders’ Summit, Simon Murray, FSI Strategy lead at Adobe and Jim Clark, Commercial Research Director at Econsultancy previewed upcoming Adobe’s Digital Trends Report. With the report having since been launched, we’ve got a host of actionable insights.

It’s often said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. This particularly rings true in Financial Services when introducing and scaling personalised experience strategies.

For those in the financial services industry, large-scale digital transformations can be overwhelming, with business-as-usual matters often occupying the agenda. Many struggle to get off the mark due to uncertainty over the outputs and perceived value, resulting in extensive deliberation over technical implementations. Even when FSI companies recognise they have fallen behind the digital maturity curve, it can remain a challenge to make meaningful progress.

Though no simple task, analysis from McKinsey found that digital leaders who have prioritised and invested in enhancing their digital propositions are reaping the rewards. Leaders have experienced five-year growth in total shareholder revenue that is, in the case of the insurance industry, six times higher than in financial services organisations that have not prioritised digital experience improvements.

In retail banking, TSB is also seeing the benefits of prioritising digital customer experiences, delivering a 300% increase in loan sales by leveraging Adobe’s profiling, journey analysis and orchestration capabilities.

Adobe’s newly launched 2024 Digital Trends FSI report shows encouraging signs that FSI organisations are making significant progress in digital CX, finding a record 21% rate their CX as “exceptional” in contrast to 8% in our 2023 findings.

Yet there is much more work to do to keep pace with these ever-evolving customer expectations, particularly as many begin to infuse generative AI into their personalisation efforts.

The 2024 Digital Trends report found 46% of digital leaders expected AI capabilities will have the greatest impact on delivering a more personalised CX, more than any other factor.

Looking ahead 3-5 years, generative AI is poised to transform the FSI customer experience significantly. Achieving true 1-to-1 personalisation at scale, beyond human capabilities, is the ultimate north star. This transformation will likely include personalised advice, proactive fraud detection, seamless omnichannel experiences and AI-powered assistants. Early successes are already demonstrating value, such as TSB’s personalised fraud prevention and real-time transaction analysis.

Critical to accelerating and scaling value from investments in personalisation is to design agility into the organisational operating model. This article explores the common issues and opportunities that digital leaders face when working to introduce such organisational change.

The Analysis Paralysis Problem

Even when leaders agree on the ‘why’ (such as customer focus and modernisation), the ‘how’ conversation often stalls progress towards achieving personalisation and transformation.

• How will we integrate new technologies with legacy systems?
• How do we ensure we have the right talent and skillsets for a digital future?
• How will we balance innovation with regulatory compliance?

All of this is often joined by misalignment across teams in goals, objectives, and incentives - all of which can create further resistance to change. These are of course all-important matters to address, yet dwelling for too long on these points can result in a lost opportunity to drive progress.

One common mistake that continues to surface is attempting to design a solution for all customer data and journeys, as opposed to the data that actively supports the initial use cases that will drive the value. The result? Wasted time and resources at best. At worst, non-compliance with privacy regulations.

The problem with such analysis paralysis in personalisation is that there is a real cost of inaction. Forrester’s 2023 Total Economic Impact study shows a composite organisation representative of interviewed customers using Adobe Experience Platform to drive their personalisation. The insights highlighted those that took action delivered a 431% return on investment with a payback period of less than 6 months.

This is no real surprise when considering that digital is now the product, not just part of the experience for FSI companies. Customers are expecting digital experiences to provide greater levels of relevancy and authenticity, with both almost being impossible to do without personalisation.

For those that are still trying to get their transformation and personalisation plans off the ground, it’s important to remember not all change has a cost associated. By introducing a cultural shift in the organisation to one of agility and experimentation, there can be a path to generating measurable growth and efficiency.

U.S. Bank: Prioritising Action:

The value of such a cultural shift is demonstrated by U.S. Bank, a recent speaker at Adobe Summit, who quadrupled marketing performance over the last 3 years by delivering personalisation-focused use cases with agile increments. The key to achieving scale was to design for the enterprise from the beginning. U.S. Bank started out with a pilot which focused on MVP data sets, before progressing through crawl, walk and run stages of their transformation.

Moving quickly to demonstrate the value of a programme through prioritised use cases can enable wider buy-in across the organisation.

For personalisation, these use cases could for example begin with utilising clickstream data to encourage completion of an application or by leveraging transactional data to introduce a lending offer. Yet more important than the use case you choose is to get started, measure and maintain a focus on value realisation. This approach can drive important learnings that can be shared and built upon within the organisation to expedite progress.

U.S. Bank’s success highlights the transformative power of an agile, experimental approach. The key enabler for U.S. Bank to reach such scale was the intention to design for the enterprise from the outset, with a scalable enterprise grade technology underpinning performance.

The time is now:

The financial services landscape is shifting faster than ever. By delaying transformation FSI companies risk falling further behind. So, while large-scale transformation may seem daunting, even small, focused experiments in personalisation can create momentum and build towards a culture of innovation within your FSI.

Consider the below steps to get started:

• Align stakeholders across the business towards a vision.
• Consider how to best structure teams to prioritise new customer value.
• Agree on the framework by which success will be measured.
• Encourage early collaboration from compliance teams.
• Set expectations, particularly with finance teams that while the features or output need to be flexible, value can be measured and realised with increased regularity.
• Identify the higher value / lower effort pilot use cases and ensure the required data for these uses cases can be activated.
• Begin deploying and measuring high value use cases, sharing learnings widely.

There’s no better time than the present to start delivering value through personalisation.

To delve deeper into the current state and future of digital experiences in the financial services industry, explore Adobe’s 2024 Digital Trends FSI report.

Read Adobe’s 2024 Digital Trends FSI report