Financial services organizations are racing to modernize the customer or member journey to meet evolving consumer expectations. They are also working to give their relationship managers the technology to compete across a new era of marketing.
Implementing the right technology solutions to power digital transformation is a critical decision that will have a lasting impact on your profits and growth.
Trusting a CRM alone for your sales and marketing leaves you vulnerable to critical gaps that can derail your customer or member relationship, whereas a modern MOS improves business relationships with a focus on one-to-one engagement that not only streamlines the sales and marketing process but also re-humanizes it, creating relationships that last a lifetime.
Before you can enhance the customer or member experience to grow lasting connections, you must lay the groundwork for digital success across four crucial steps.
- Step One: Assess Your Digital Maturity
- Step Two: Gather Input from Key Stakeholders
- Step Three: Build A Business Case
- Step Four: Align with Your Executive Team
Below we detail the first step in the process:
Step One: Assess Your Digital Maturity
The first step in moving toward a better marketing and sales solution is assessing how you currently handle digital innovation, productivity and customer experience. This assessment should be honest in order to discover areas for improvement across your digital channels.
Digital Agility
Digital disruption is changing the financial services industry as we know it. As non-traditional competitors emerge to provide unprecedented customer or member value, building a modern financial brand not only requires a constant eye to digital innovation but also digital agility.
Enterprise organizations often get shackled to the performance of legacy systems that are neither modern nor productive. Embarking on any transformational IT initiative is a daunting prospect for any company. There are hurdles to modernizing your core technology systems, so it helps to assess the agility of your current technology stack in the face of constant digital disruption.
Ask the following questions to gauge your digital agility in the face of digital disruption:
- How many software solutions do you currently use?
- Do your software solutions all integrate with your core infrastructure?
- How easy is it for your financial brand to make continuous improvements to your core technology solutions to match evolving consumer expectations?
- How does your financial brand typically deploy new software solutions?
- What’s the average implementation window when you deploy a new solution?
- Does your financial brand empower your relationship managers to deliver a seamless customer or member journey across channels?
Productivity
Relationship managers become overburdened by time-consuming manual processes when they should be focused on connecting with consumers.
To grow business lines and profit margins, leaders must determine the productivity impact of their current technology solutions and look for areas to focus on improving.
Here are some common areas to consider:
- Does your technology connect your data silos into a single system of record, equipping your relationship managers with access to the data insights and content they need to advance relationships in a fraction of the time?
- Does your technology make it easier for cross-functional teams to work together to build trust and loyalty?
- Does your technology bog your relationship managers down or free up their time to focus on establishing meaningful connections?
- Which manual tasks are preventing your relationship managers from focusing on customers or members – and how could technology help you minimize these tasks?
There are many productivity signals to monitor in your technology environment, but modern financial brands focus on actions that reduce the friction between effort and results.
Customer Experience
To best rate the digital maturity of your customer or member experience, organizations must understand how well they are meeting rising consumer expectations across the customer or member journey.
By solving problems, reducing friction and creating elevated experiences, organizations can exceed consumer demands with engagement that adds value and builds loyalty and trust.
To evaluate the digital sophistication of your customer or member experience, answer the following questions:
- Who are your core customer or member personas?
- Which touchpoints do your core groups of customers or members value most?
- What are your customers’ or members’ needs in each lifecycle stage with your financial brand?
- What happens with a customer or member after their initial transaction with your financial brand?
- What gaps do you need to fill across your customer or member journey?
Conclusion
The path to digital transformation requires a solid foundation upon which you can build – and scale – if you hope to modernize your customer or member journey and compete in the new era of marketing.
Step one requires asking hard questions regarding your digital maturity in key business areas, including innovation, productivity and customer or member experience.
Look for part two coming soon, where we detail the second critical step, gathering input from key stakeholders, on your road to digital transformation.
