One of the industries that has seen the biggest disruption from the smartphone revolution and the pandemic is financial, in particular, banking.
The image of the friendly banker, helping you with your finances has all but disappeared, with the main interaction coming through applications and online banking. Although the user experience has been improved, the customer no longer forms an affinity with one bank and instead of staying for the service and relationships, the only reason people stick around is for interest rates and charges.
Giving customers reason to stick around has become more important following the COVID-19 pandemic, with even less trips to the bank and more interactions online, customers need a reason to stay. Soprano Design, Field Marketing Manager, Linda Adams said that the answer lies in an effective communications strategy through CPaaS solutions.
“Banks have invested heavily in digital banking infrastructure and the investment has been underscored as a priority during the pandemic” said Adams, “However, only between 40 and 60 percent of bank customers use their respective banks apps and adoption only grew three percent during the pandemic.
“Banks are being forced to continually spend on adoption if they want more of their customer base to move their banking activities online. The idea is that they’re investing heavily in getting people to use mobile apps, but they’re missing out on about half of their customers who aren’t using it regularly.
“In addition to this, we have found that banks consider the CPaaS solutions that we provide to be a kind of necessary evil for one-time passwords and two factor authentication so they are really seeing it as an expense that they want to reduce.
“In reality, an effective CPaaS strategy can actually drive the customer experience, in conjunction with the mobile app, that they are looking for.”
Driving Traffic
According to Adams, banks are missing out on a huge opportunity to engage with their customers as well as drive traffic to their own banking apps.
One of the barriers to increased usage is the “hijacking” of third-party banking apps that allow customers to pay and transfer money from one app, such as Venmo and Cash App. With the right communications strategy banking can cash in on a higher engagement.
“The way we see it is that banks want to drive users towards their apps and the flat usage statistics for text messages show that an SMS campaign is the best way to achieve this.
“A text message is read within three minutes of receipt, and the response rates are higher than email and notifications from other apps. They now have an eight times higher response rate, and five times higher read rate than email.
“The fact is people are conditioned to respond to text messages quicker than they are to anything else on their phone. From there, banks can start to drive the customer experience through the CPaaS platform.
“Whether that be text or even in social media apps, such as WhatsApp, they are then able to direct people back to that customer journey they want them on without them having to use an app that they may not engage with.”
Kicking on
Once an effective communications strategy is established, banks can then start to promote their added services.
“The CPaaS solution is the engine that powers the entire customer journey,” said Adams. “Banks are already using it for one-time passwords and two factor authentication, just by doing these standard tasks they are building customer loyalty.
“With the use of a CPaaS platform, businesses can then power the rest of the customer journey to the next phase. That could include upselling or sharing thought leadership on finances to keep a customer engaged and loyal”
“Just as CPaaS is powering that security function, it should be powering marketing, customer service and all other functions, so people don’t have to go searching for the information they want.”
