Deloitte was pushing financial services firms toward a focus on life events way back in 2015—specifically calling out the importance of engaging with consumers across the journey: “A common misperception is life events are point-in-time when, in fact, they are small journeys in a consumer’s life.”1
So, why are most financial services firms (FSFs) still stuck on reactive, product-centric, fact-based personalization? It’s easy to blame the FSFs themselves, or a conventionally conservative industry, but the reality is the technology was lagging. Today, the tech has finally caught up to the needs, and FSFs can build their life event engagement strategy around three essential capabilities:
Centralize customer data to see the full customer profile
Most FSFs already collect reams of data on their customers. But in the typical organization, that customer data is spread across (and stuck within) siloed systems. Organizations need to start by breaking down those silos, connecting internal systems, and creating a centralized customer profile.
But these customer profiles can’t be limited to internal data because life events don’t revolve around financial services. To get the early signals, financial services organizations need to look beyond their four walls and bring in relevant customer data that expands and deepens their understanding of the customer.
Use analytics to get actionable insights
Many data providers can deliver some type of notification when customers have moved, made a credit inquiry, have equity to leverage, etc. But FSFs receiving these alerts don’t usually have an automated way to prioritize or respond to these alerts in a timely manner, which then results in outreach being too little and too late.
Fortunately, taking action on these alerts is possible with today’s technology. Customer engagement platforms harness the power of centralized, comprehensive customer profiles to surface those insights and help segment those customers to better identify high-quality opportunities. So, you can engage immediately to provide support at those key milestones when a customer needs your guidance the most.
Connect intelligence with action
Most FSFs already have some type of customer engagement tool. And many of those tools now deliver analytics and data insights (some even of the predictive variety). But where most sputter out is enabling action, in real time and at scale. Even if an FSF is using state-of-the-art technology to produce predictive insights, relying on manual workflows and one-to-one phone calls to act on those insights brings everything to a screeching halt.
Instead, FSFs should seek out leading platforms that bring together a system of analytics-driven customer intelligence with a system for automated action. This type of integrated intelligence + action platform should be able to directly use predictive life event insights to trigger automated engagement journeys—delivering hyper-relevant, genuinely helpful educational content and guidance at critical moments in that customer’s financial journey.
Building trustworthy relationships in a face-to-screen world starts in the tech stack
In a digital-first world, achieving life event engagement at scale requires re-evaluating the marketing tech stack. Organizations need to put tools in place to build a centralized, rich customer profile that can identify intent, anticipate customer needs, and surface opportunities for customer-facing teams. Total Expert’s automated engagement platform enables FSFs to act on those insights and fuel more personalized, more authentic customer interactions as they navigate each life event.
