Extend the holiday spirit throughout the year with a data-driven customer experience

It’s the season for sending holiday messages to those you care about. Even though you may not hear from them often through the rest of the year, it’s good to know they haven’t forgotten you and that you’re still an important part of their family and community. While this is a personal activity, the same thing can be applied to a business and its customers. You share a relationship that requires continued nurturing and while many businesses, including credit unions, may show special customer appreciation during year’s end, this is a concept that can pay dividends year round.

Try this simple exercise to give you an indication if your customers know how much you care:

• Rank yourself from 1-100 on how much you care about your members.
• Now rank your colleagues and your credit union as a whole on the same scale, how much your staff and employees care about your members.
• Finally, rank how much you think your customers know that you care about them.

My guess is the first two numbers are high, the last one maybe not so much. Caring internally isn’t enough—it is always important to show members that you care. Credit unions are noted for providing a more personal experience than most other financial institutions—and it’s vital that your members know this isn’t accidental, that you put considerable effort into making their experience with your institution a positive one.

Utilizing all data at your disposal is one way to hone a stronger relationship with your members, showing that you not only care, but that you can provide what they need based on who they are. However, too often, data silos collected piecemeal and stored in various systems throughout the organization get in the way of understanding customer preferences, tailoring communications, responding quickly and, ultimately, optimizing the customer experience (CX). Just like the content of your personal holiday cards, your communications with members should be personalized to demonstrate that you understand and care about their needs.    

Making a list and checking it twice

Meaningful communications can be difficult if you don’t have clean records. Gartner research shows that 40% of all business initiatives fail due to poor data quality. To begin enriching your data quality, start by profiling the data; categorizing your data assets and determining their quality. This creates awareness of the bigger data problems within the organization and gets you organized for the next step.

Next, cleanse the data to resolve issues you’ve identified and standardize it to meet your business needs. Do that with each source, and then consolidate the data, matching and merging like entities to create a single view of your members. Data may be further enriched by leveraging additional sources. Append data attributes with sources like a directory of national changes of address to improve delivery effectiveness. Or screen members against sanction lists, to ensure data meets regulatory standards. In an ideal data management situation, this should be integrated into the single customer view technology solution you have adopted, rather than tacked on as an after-thought through the use of additional software. Enriching data will not only help provide a better customer experience, it will also help with compliance and/or reduce risk.

Reaping the gift of a better customer experience

Each touchpoint on the customer journey is an opportunity to improve the customer experience, or damage it, so the places where customer data is being used needs to be identified, and standards established to ensure a positive outcome. Measure all the data against those standards to determine quality. For example, if you want to send an email communication, you need valid email addresses. What percentage of emails for the target audience is either missing, invalid or undeliverable? The same can be done with phone numbers to which texts are sent, or social media handles.

When you improve data you also reduce waste and the poor customer experience associated with duplicate data. Physical mail is an expense, so you want to avoid sending multiple pieces to the same member because their name is spelled three different ways in three different databases. Receiving more than one piece of the same thing is automatically perceived as junk mail. Essentially, your goal is to create a data platform that allows you to analyze and monitor the quality of the data assets that are driving the customer journey and, ultimately, the customer experience. Find technology solutions that will allow you to create a connection between the data and its impact on your goals to build organizational awareness of any problems.

‘Tis the season for quantifiable benefits

As you go through the process of cleansing and standardizing data, you are establishing the way that you want new, incoming data to conform to your single member view. Combining the data from all available sources enables you to deliver a personalized customer experience at any time of the year. As you incorporate your silos of data, it’s important to track the metrics. How many duplicates have been removed, how many cleansing issues have been resolved? How much time have you saved?

Pulling the pieces together into a 360-degree view is the precursor to effective member communications. It allows you to fully leverage data as a strategic business asset, to use this high-quality data within your member experience ecosystem. With a 360-degree view of your member, they become fully-realized individuals. For example, a member named John Smith might now also be identified as the head of household, aged between 35 and 40 with a household income of $75 to $100K and a new baby in the house. He follows your credit union on Facebook and recently made an online purchase. This consolidated, standardized data now provides a single member view that can be used by other systems in your organization as well, which will definitely put your organization on the nice list.

Members of your credit union are not going to take any more time than they have to when opening accounts or getting approval on transactions if they find another CU can do it in real time. For example, opening a savings account should be a simple operation. If one CU can’t check your data against sanction lists, or perform a credit check automatically, another one can. And it’s the latter that will win the battle for that new member. Having a solid data management solution in place is critical to reducing the time it takes to do manual work, because, as the saying goes, time is money.

To be able to deliver a truly personalized experience for your members, you must be able to capture and leverage customer data from online and offline channels. This involves developing a data management strategy that builds a single view of your members, the foundation for data-driven marketing. Relevant personalized communications delivered in a timely manner can work wonders to improve your members’ view of the relationship they have with your organization—and paying such close attention all year long will not go unnoticed.