The Marketing Perspective

Marketing leaders in the Banking sector understand the challenges of ensuring products and services are presented to customers and potential customers in a way that is both relevant and informative. Optimising the marketing mix has never been more challenging, as channel choice and output media multiply. Business Units demand the kind of campaigns and communications that customers are likely to respond to, yet Finance is pressing down on costs and IT struggles to service your marketing vision in the required timescales. To do these, you need to build organisational capabilities that can effectively deliver the right combination of positive customer experiences at market leading cost points.

Matching of products and services to customers relies on employees fully understanding the customer profile with a comprehensive view of financial status, correspondence history, call centre interactions, credit ratings, etc ­ in short, as much relevant information as the bank has within its systems to make an informed decision on suitability of product and customer. However too often information is unavailable to staff at the time they need it; stored in difficult to access silos.

The ease of changing the message (or brand), individually or segment-wide, should be as fast and simple as possible, enabling cost-effective communications with customers. This needs attention to proper systems design enabling users to control their output. Whatever the service or product arena, departments interacting with customers need to be responsive to changing trends, new delivery paths and the growing demand of customers to have access to their interactions history at their fingertips on their choice of media, at any time.

Too many organisations are still focused on understanding markets rather than individuals, yet the growth of social media technologies allow extremely high levels of communication and targeting of personalised messages. Measuring the cost-effectiveness of communications has never been easier.

With Icon UK, effective servicing of existing customers and exploiting their continued relationship with carefully managed cross-sales opportunities can make significant revenue contributions. Key to a satisfied customer is effective management of all interactions with point-of-contact knowledge of all material information (assets, debts, case histories, correspondence, usage of bank products, etc). Whether selling a new service or addressing a service request, ensure you have a clear and integrated view of your customers. Enable your share of wallet to bulge through precision cross-selling, up-selling, customer understanding and empathy.

Challenges

Being able to communicate to customers in an effective and relevant way, whilst remaining within the marketing budget, is a key challenge. Banking organisations need to present consistent branding and appearance for documents and electronic communications. However complex systems can unnecessarily lead to costly rework and time-to-market delays. Challenges include:

• Valuable customer feedback generated via call centre agents, self-service portals and other methods can be difficult to capture, classify and access within a corporate context without the right systems in place. Without these, competitive edge is being eroded by competitors with better information management and customer segmentation capabilities.
• Client Documentation must be clear, unambiguous and well presented, while at the same time being technically correct and certainly not misleading. This requires careful drafting, with systems that provide for powerful re-use of existing approved content, and ones that enable a clearly auditable path from staff writing customer communications to those reviewing them.
• Marketers invest greatly in developing and fine tuning brand imagery, styling and language. Yet internal systems can frustrate with limited capabilities to ensure that output is both optimised for its channel and the core brand attributes and messages remain complaint to corporate standards. 
• Many in the Banking sector have core legacy systems that are many years old, producing acceptably accurate documentation but in older styles. Presenting a dated look-and-feel does little to enhance reputation or engender new business.

Against the backdrop of these challenges, marketing leaders in this sector need an enterprise tool that will tackle these issues whilst under the watchful eye of regulators, legislators and influencers [such as the BOE, FSA, HMRC and BBA]. Neglecting this space means not only is reputation and customer confidence at risk, but there may be possible fines or even loss of operating licences if these issues are not dealt with promptly and satisfactorily.

At Icon UK we specialise in these areas, creating customized solutions for each client and working with Marketing Directors and the Marketing team to guide them through assessments to maximise desired improvements in Revenue enhancement, Customer Service, Cost reduction and Compliance.

How Icon Helps

Icon Suite offers Banking organisations the opportunity to address all these challenges in one solution platform. Practically every type of document can be flexibly constructed from pre-approved templates, incorporating powerful re-use and multi-lingual features. The types of output that can be produced include Proposals and Quotations, Order confirmations and Policies, Statements, Customer Self-Service, Correspondence and Agent Communications (see ‘Uses’ on Banking Overview).

Different modes of customer engagement are supported: pre-planned, interactive or on-demand across all media types. Through deploying this platform, with transformational change and operational services where required, we enable organisations to change the way they engage with customers. Customers can benefit from highly personalised, flexible and positive experiences that they are pleased to recommend to others. And this can be social media enabled too.

Icon UK can assist in the all areas related to improving customer communications including:

Companies that engage Icon find they can understand what customer communications are really costing and translate this into a compelling Return on Investment case. By investing in the right solutions they can improve content and policy control, increased customer loyalty and by achieving top-quartile performance in customer communications management, develop a robust platform for strategic objectives [such as rapidly re-branding following restructuring, or large scale multi-lingual, multi-country, multi-channel mass communications delivered cost-effectively with personalised messaging and details in each one] and tactical delivery.

Some of the world’s largest and leading Banking and Financial Services organisations use our technology solutions. Call us to find out how we can help your organisation.