Customer Journey Mapping: A Real-Life Approach to Your Digital Marketing Strategy
As financial services and insurance (FSI) companies strive to deliver the seamless multi-channel customer experience, the traditional marketing model has been radically reimagined.
Innovative institutions are showing how cross-functional teams focusing on the customer journey can work to develop a single view of the customer – an approach that can bring tangible rewards.
Yet research shows that large institutions still have some way to go in maximising the return on their investment in this area.
Integrating the banking customer experience
The predominance of mobile and digital media continues to drive transformation in the FSI sector, as C-level executives and marketing teams respond to the needs of their biggest demographic market: the millennial generation.
This is a market of consumers who are accustomed to having a vast array of online and offline options for researching and buying new products and services, 24/7. Millennials are increasingly expecting the same seamless customer experience from their banks and insurers as they do from the digital pioneers in other sectors.
Traditionally fast followers rather than early adopters when it comes to new technologies, FSI companies have also seen other industries encroach on their territory by offering financial services, such as payment processing and short-term loans as part of their buying experience.
FSI executives and marketing teams are therefore under pressure to integrate the banking experience across physical and virtual channels, not only to cut costs, but to exploit sales opportunities and avoid losing market share to new challengers.
A radical rethink of the traditional marketing model
As a recent McKinsey report explains, most banks’ marketing organisations used to be geared toward relatively slow-paced campaigns, focused on pushing single products at a time across a range of channels.
But this traditional marketing model is being turned on its head. Now, banks are shifting investment to “always-on” marketing programs, in which they engage with individual customers at every touchpoint along the decision journey. These marketing programmes are typically conducted according to a test-and-learn approach that gauges an individual customer’s specific needs in real-time.
Under this approach, it is the customer decision journey, rather than an individual transaction, that drives the marketing strategy. This is already being implemented, according to a banking sector briefing produced last year by KPMG Nunwood. This includes the example of Kiwibank, (a startup created by the New Zealand post office) who has made this kind of customer journey focused strategy the basis for its entire organisational structure.
A cross-functional organisation geared toward the customer journey
Kiwibank is not organised according to traditional hierarchical and divisional lines. Instead, it is a cross-functional organisation encompassing the core capabilities of the three Ds:
- Discovery. Analysing data from a huge number of customers.
- Design. Modeling how their life journeys might play out for future customers.
- Delivery. Providing the right offering, at the right time, in the right way.
Untapped sales and revenue potential among large organisations
Despite progress in this sector, Econsultancy’s recent Multichannel Reality report highlights that companies in the FSI industry still find understanding the customer journey a challenge. Only a third of respondents to the survey said that their organisation had managed to achieve a single view of the customer through journey mapping.
Brian Manasuma, Research Director at IT research and advisory company Gartner, believes this is because today’s sheer number of customer engagement channels makes it far more difficult to keep track. “It has become very difficult to establish how all our different points of contact are perceived—and I’m not even sure the customer knows.”
Achieving a single view of the customer may also prove more challenging for large organisations than for their smaller counterparts. In this case, it makes sense for larger companies to work with a partner on the three Ds, for instance by helping to put in place the right technological infrastructure and by assisting with the creation, management, and localisation of marketing content.
Embracing journey management in this way has the potential to yield tangible benefits for companies. A report by the Aberdeen Group suggests that focusing on the entire customer journey brings a 50% greater return on marketing investment, nearly 25% more positive social media mentions, more than 2.5 times greater revenue from customer referrals, and, crucially, 55% greater cross-sell and upsell revenue than competitors.
Key takeaways
- In response to evolving customer demands and competition from challengers outside the industry, FSIs are moving toward integrating the customer experience.
- This is turning the traditional, slow-paced campaign-driven marketing model on its head. The need for always-on marketing requires an organisational rethink.
- Providers such as Kiwibank are pioneering flat, cross-functional structures to implement new journey-focused strategies.
- Larger banks and insurers still have some way to go, but choosing the right partner is a good first step.